Unhidden

Mirenka Cechova’s “The Voice of Anne Frank”
Paul Sprenger Theater
Atlas Performing Arts Center
Washington, DC
November 7, 2015

by George Jackson
 © 2015 by George Jackson

 

Almost everyone knows the story of Anne Frank. Among the many moving texts about the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s diary is singular because her voice is that of a child. Precocious as she was, and on the verge of becoming a woman, a child’s sense of wonder echoes throughout her thoughts. How the adult Mirenka Cechova would impersonate the girl Anne Frank was a question foremost in the minds of many viewers. Cechova began by showing Anne from behind. She faces walls, moves along their lengths and feels their unyielding expanse. Cechova’s arms articulate Anne’s impatience with such clarity that I suspect she has been trained in classical ballet. An awareness is apparent of just how elbows should be bent and wrists angled in order to covey a girl’s will and the frustrations it encounters. Not that the rest of the rear aspect is neglected. Cechova’s alert shoulders, the expanse of her back, the legs and feet play their parts in shaping an image of youth. One almost wishes that she would never turn around, and when she first does it is for an instant too brief to count. Then, though, Cechova shows us her face.

 

Mirenka Cechova, photo by Martin Marak. 

The features we see are, plausibly, those of a young teenage girl. They could belong to someone a bit older or a little younger. They are plain and still except for the eyes. The eyes are large, deep and alive, painfully alive. Cechova spends considerable time establishing the vitality of Anne’s activity, even though confined, hidden away as it is within walls, in secret rooms, in order to shield her from the Nazi gaze. Anne has time on her hands to play games, to imagine a normal life, and to dream. Dreaming, though, is dangerous, for each unbidden experience can turn into a nightmare.The theatrics of this production are fairly straightforward: darkness and light, silence and sounds. Among the sounds are music and speech. Some of the music issues from cellist Nancy Jo Snider seated high above the action like a witnessing angel. It is the action, though, the movement of Cechova’s body in a limited space, that primarily narrates. Cechova also speaks what are presumably some of Anne’s lines, but their impact is that of a voice easier to understand as tone – just like that of Snider’s cello – than as text.    

 

Anne dreaming suggested again that Cechova’s training is classical, for her steps were ballet. Suddenly there is pounding and all light is doused. The rest is darkness. We know that Anne and her companions in hiding were discovered, arrested, and sent to concentration camps. Anne died a prisoner, probably from typhus, not long before the defeat of the Nazis. The diary she kept during her time of hiding survives her.