A Shining Season

`Anne Frank," "Fiddler" and "Collected Stories"
all plays with Jewish themes — highlight Stra t ford 2000.

From left to right:
Barbara Barsky as Golde and Brent Carver
as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof"

Uta Hagen in "Collected Stories':
"Part of becoming an artist is learning
how to identify with anything or anybody"

Maggie Blake as Anne Frank and Adrienne
Gould as Margot Frank in "The Diary
of Anne Frank." To help prepare for their
roles, the actresses met with Holocaust
survivor Anita Mayer, who shared
a bunk with Anne, Margot, their mother
and one other inmate at Auschwitz.

FRAN HELLER
Special to the Jewish News

l

ax

5/26
2000

84

t was more than a year ago when Richard
Monette, artistic director of the Stratford
Festival, approached well-known Canadian actor
and director Al Waxman and told him that he
couldn't leave the 20th century without addressing the
Holocaust. "Will you direct Anne Frank?" Monette
asked. It was an offer Waxman couldn't refuse.
Waxman, who made his Stratford acting debut in
a brilliant performance as Willy Loman in the 1998
production of Death of a Salesman, brings the same
depth of passion and scholarship in his Stratford
directorial debut.

In addition to extensive reading and research,
Waxman journeyed to Amsterdam and the Secret
Annex, where he immersed himself in the materials
and milieu of Anne and the seven others who hid in
the attic for two years and one month prior to their
betrayal and arrest by the Nazis.
In one sense, directing Anne Frank is related to
Waxman's own life experience. The Jewish director
was raised in a home that opened its heart and spare
rooms to displaced persons following World War II.
At age 14, Waxman was surrounded at times by as
many as half a dozen young men aged 18-20 who
had survived Auschwitz and were trying to rebuild
their lives in Canada.
Waxman's stepfather and stepbrother (his own

father died when Al was 10) also were survivors of
Auschwitz.
The Stratford production, based on Wendy
Kesselman's newly revised adaptation of the 1955
original play by Frances Goodrich and Albert
Hackett, draws from the newer, more realistic ver-
sion of the diary, published in 1995.
"In the original version," Waxman elaborates,
"you could take the play as meaning, 'Look at man's
inhumanity to man.' That's a pretty safe blanket
phrase. What we are doing here is saying very clear-
ly, 'This only happened to these people because they
are Jews.'"
Other productions Waxman has directed in the-
aters throughout Canada include Lost in Yonkers,