Spotlight: ANNE BEING FRANK at Aventura Arts & Cultural Center

Anne Being Frank’, a new play by Ron Elisha, is a total reimagining of the story of Anne Frank. This one-woman show starring Alexis Fishman was performed Off-Broadway to rave reviews.

It is a reimagining designed to force us to view an iconic story that we thought we knew through entirely fresh eyes, leading us to question certain dear-held assumptions. It poses the basic question: Had Anne known precisely what was in store for her and her family at the hands of the Nazis, would she still have written the famous line: ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart’?

The play takes place within three ‘worlds’: The world of the secret annex, where Anne and her family are hiding from their German occupiers – this is the story we all know, though it is now retold in hindsight. The world of the concentration camp – Bergen-Belsen – where Anne and her sister, Margot, ended their days. And an imagined world where Anne goes over the manuscript of her diary with her editor at a publishing house in Manhattan after the war. But, at great personal cost, she has, with her devastating new insight into the depths of human depravity, rewritten her entire diary, so that she is constantly having to justify her choices to her editor, who dearly wishes to maintain the purity and innocence of the original.

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