By SHARON EBERSON
History, no matter how traumatic, no matter how horrific, demands we bear witness, and, in the best of all worlds, we experience empathy, we fine-tune our humanity. We learn.
And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, a multimedia production by Prime Stage, is not an easy watch, nor will most of us be able to shake it off long after leaving the New Hazlett Theater. But its lessons are vital to any era, in any moment in time. The production, directed by Art DeConciliis, is a testament to the power of theater to inform and move us, as well as a stunning gut punch of reality in troubled times.
In a seamlessly effective mix of live performance and video testimony recorded by Holocaust survivors Eva Geiringer Schloss and Helmut “Ed” Silverberg – friend and boyfriend to Anne Frank just as Germany was given over to Hitler’s fascist reign – playwright James Still shares their stories of hardship, loss and, ultimately, freedom.
And Then They Came for Me premiered in 1996, and was part of Prime Stage’s 1998-99 season, performed at CLO Academy. Prime Stage’s artistic director, Wayne Brinda, a friend of playwright Still, said that the writer was at first uncertain about a production where the balance of video interviews to performance leaned toward the young actors portraying Eva, her brother Heinz, Helmut (called “Hello” in Anne Frank’s diary), Anne and a devoted “German Youth,” the latter representing children groomed for Nazi zealotry.
It’s a balance that works beautifully in the current stirring production, expressed by two young actors at opposite ends of the World War II dynamic: cherubic, uniformed Colin Bozick, a Mt. Lebanon seventh-grader, swearing undying allegiance to Hitler, and Pittsburgh CAPA seventh-grader Molly Frontz, who plays Anne Frank as many of us have come to know her: playful, outgoing … until she disappears from her friends’ lives forever.
Playing Eva and Ed, when they were Jewish teens whose worlds were ripped apart by Nazi occupation, are the talented Sadie Karashin, an eighth-grader and Pittsburgh Musical Theater Conservatory student, and Point Park University’s Ayden Freed. Jackson Frazer (film credits include Clifford the Big Red Dog) is heart-wrenching as Eva’s brother, Heinz.
The cumulative experience of these youngsters shows, as their characters – intersperced with testimonial reminders that they are portraying real people – are thrust into dire situations. Both Eva and Ed, like Anne Frank, spent many months in hiding. Eva and her family were eventually discovered, sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp and separated, Eva with her mother, and her father and Heinz sent off together.
Stacey Rosleck and Eric Leslie portray both sets of parents, thrust into impossible situations.
And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank.
(Image: Laura Slovesko)
The projected interviews with Eva Schloss, now 94, and Ed Silverberg, were conducted in 1995 and ’96. Silverberg died in 2015. Their chilling testimony is interspersed with relatively tame images that become horrific as they are described. For example, a scrubbed, white-walled room at Auschwitz is seen, but the mind can transform it as Eva Schloss describes what happened there: Any time prisoners were given soap and told they were going to a shower, they didn’t know if that day, they were going to their deaths.
The daily conditions in the camps – starvation, cold, rats, disease – were as harsh as the cruelty of their captors, many no older than teens themselves.
Knowing in advance that both Eva and Ed survived the Holocaust helps mightily, as the dire situations of their youth mount.
Can there be spoilers when recounting facts? One of the twists of their stories, if you could call it that, is what happened to Eva and her mother after Auschwitz was liberated by Russian forces.
They were reunited with the lone survivor of Anne’s family, her father, Otto Frank, who became Eva’s stepfather. This fact is revealed early on, during a portion of Eva’s interview, and informs some of what we know of their families’ fates.
Ed’s perseverance, which the real Ed recounts almost matter-of-factly, is given exuberant determination by Freed’s performance. Karashin makes palpable all that Eva endured, as well as her will to survive.
Scenic designer and technical director Alex Barnhart has provided the actors with a minimalist set – a table and chair, a bricked wall, a transit platform – offset perfectly beneath the looming screen. Lighting designer Ken Clothier and sound designer Samantha Magill make the most of a row of lights that hover along the platform, and the crashing sounds and harsh cries of a world gone mad.
Anne Frank’s name in the title of Still’s play works as the universal symbol of Jewish victims of Nazi extermination. She is frozen in time, through her words and the images that survive, before her murder at age 16. Hearing people who knew Anne when she was full of hope and promise is heartbreaking, no matter how much you think you know about her.
The inhumanity that led to the death of nearly 6 million Jews during the Holocaust also was visited on Catholics, Muslims, LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma, Slavic peoples … all were victims of Nazi persecution and murder.
That points to the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller that inspired the title of this vital work, told in Prime Stage’s powerful production:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
PRIME STAGE EVENTS
Emily Loeb, director of programs and education at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and a consultant on the production, addressed the audience before Friday’s preview night. She reminded us that at 7 p.m. Monday, March 4, Prime Stage will present a video of the play Perseverance, about Pittsburgher Melvin Goldman and based on the book “Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America,” by Goldman and Lee Goldman Kikel, and directed by DeConciliis.
The screening at the New Hazlett Center for Performing Arts includes a post-show discussion with the author Kikel, playwright McCullough, and DeConciliis. Tickets and details: https://primestage.com/education/perseverance/
For opening night on Saturday, March 2, Father John Nieman will discuss his friendship with Otto Frank and Miep Gies during a post-show discussion.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The Prime Stage production of And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank is at the New Hazlett Theater, North Side, through March 10, 2024.Tickets: https://ci.ovationtix.com/36406/production/1175928 or call 412-320-4610.
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