It was nearly impossible to avoid seeing posters all over campus for this year's winner of the New Jersey Playwrights Contest, "Margot Frank: The Diary of the Other Young Girl." When I first noticed the posters, and the prominent words, "a new musical comedy," I thought this couldn't possibly be a parody of Anne Frank. I was wrong.
It was actually a fairly brilliant and completely original take on the famous story of the Frank sisters hiding out from the Nazis in an apartment in Amsterdam with the Van Pels family. The show began with a high school drama class bickering over the casting for the play within the play, which was to be the traditional theatrical version of The Diary of Anne Frank. High school student Min-go, the cast's lone Asian performer questioned the logic of allowing Jewish students to portray Nazis, and in her words, a flaming homosexual to play the lead romantic interest, but not allowing her, a Chinese-American to play the title role. The students and teacher hilariously thwart her efforts, and soon grow tired of her grandstanding. This is where the play took a turn for the seriously odd: A sandbag falls on Min-go from above, and she falls unconscious to the floor, setting the stage for a totally bizarre play to take place in Min-go's unconscious state.
This was a true group cast effort. Each performer dutifully rearranged the set before, after, and even during action on stage, moving around furniture and placing props where they belong without drawing excessive focus from the characters speaking. There was a lot of physical comedy in the performance, people were falling out of chairs, and Peter Van Pels was repeatedly beaten with a fish. This unique performance was laugh out loud funny at times. The usually contemplative, sensitive Anne Frank that we know from her diary has been replaced by a snotty, petulant brat, portrayed frighteningly realistically by Hilary Goldman.
When I said the play was weird, I meant just that. At one point, the Marx Brothers, Barbara Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr., Moses, and Jesus Christ himself were all literally on the stage dancing and singing about their respective rank among the most famous Jews of all time. According to the play, Jesus was number one, Anne Frank was number two.
All weirdness and borderline psychedelic imagery aside, the play's central theme was shining the spotlight on the lesser noticed people among us. Margot Frank represented the girl living in the shadow of her one day legendary sister Anne. According to the play, Margot was actually the one who kept that brilliant diary during the war. Anne plagiarized Margot's diary word for word, and claimed it as her own, thereby relegating Margot to her mostly forgotten place in history.
I had a wonderful time at Margot Frank. The writers of the play and the music, Lori Mooney and Diana Rissetto should be praised for their daring, and irreverent take on a very somber subject. It is not easy to walk that thin line between shocking humor and offensiveness, but both Mooney and Rissetto did so deftly, and with unflinching courage.
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