Photo by Thee Photo Ninja
Welcome to a new feature for The Gabber Newspaper; a husband and wife team seeing one play with two sets of eyes and two different viewpoints. We’re hoping that you, the reader, will enjoy this little twist in the standard theater review as we look at the various theater performances throughout Pinellas County.
This initial offering covers freeFall Theatre’s presentation of James Still’s documentary play, And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank.
For those who are unfamiliar with freeFall Theatre, it is a professional theater in St. Petersburg known for presenting both familiar and new plays in a unique space. And Then They Came for Me is no exception. While many theater presentations exist, this documentary is exceptional because it tells a real story of the German experience from 1938 to 1945.
Interviews of the Truth
The play opens on a stark stage with two large projection screens up stage. These screens project interviews with two Holocaust survivors that took place sometime in the 1960s or ‘70s. These two people are not actors, they are real people telling their real stories about the horrors of the most brutal period in world history. Interspersed with these stories are the actors portraying these two people, their parents, and their friends as they all try to cope with the Jewish genocide that occurred at this time.
What makes this play unusual is that it is a real story of real events, not the usual fictional representation of life as we know it. The subtext referring to Anne Frank is presented as a minor contextual device to link the story of The Diary of Anne Frank to an audience that might be familiar with the productions, or the book, of the same name. However, Anne Frank is not the central theme of this play. It is a true story presented in a new way to relate a story of hate, death, and destruction of a nation under the leadership of an overly ambitious man who saw himself as the superman of his age.
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Arts All Around!
The Gabber Newspaper covers live theater and art across South Pinellas. And, when we find something worth the drive, we cover art in the Tampa Bay and Sarasota areas.
Director Eric Davis precisely and simply wove the media presentation of the interviews with the live action of his actors, resulting in a moving, troubling telling of pre-WWII Germany and the subsequent Holocaust period. The six actors, some playing multiple roles, expertly showed their characters’ human emotions as they lived through the atrocities that occurred in Germany at that time. The play’s only shortcoming is the author’s failure to fully develop the characters’ complete natures as presented. Since we are only given snippets of the characters’ lives across seven years, there isn’t enough time to fully develop more than a surface-level understanding of the emotions and struggles the characters experienced in real life.
I highly recommend this production, if only to remind us all how this could happen again anywhere, even in the United States.
See And Then They Came For Me
freeFall Theatre, 6099 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. Through May 17. Wed.-Sat., 7 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. freefalltheatre.com, 727-498-5205.
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