The Frank family — Edith (Era Creepingbear), Otto (Robyn Douglass), Margot (Hannah Finney) and Anne (Maggie Bullock) — arrives outside the home where they will spend the next two years in hiding. YS Schools will present “The Diary of Anne Frank” Jan. 15–17, at the John Legend Theater in Springfield. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Young thespians stage ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’
- Published: January 15, 2026
This week, when the young thespians of YS Middle and High School step on stage at the John Legend Theater in Springfield, they’ll be carrying the customary lines, blocking and costumes.
They’ll also be carrying several months of historical study and personal reckoning with a dark chapter in human history — a chapter that, students told the News this week, feels increasingly relevant.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is set to run its final two performances Friday and Saturday, Jan. 16 and 17, after an opening performance Thursday, Jan. 15.
The red, checkered diary of Annelies Marie Frank — a 13th-birthday gift from father Otto, mother Edith and sister Margot — was never meant for anyone but its young owner. Like any teenager, Anne filled it with dreams, family tensions and hopes for romance.
Since its 1947 publication by Otto Frank, the family’s lone Holocaust survivor, millions have read her account of two years hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, in which she wrote of persecution, arrests and the constant fear of discovery in the “secret annex.”
All of that historical and cultural context was necessary before any of the cast and crew ever stepped into a rehearsal room, according to director Lorrie Sparrow-Knapp.
“You can’t come into this play and not understand how you got there,” she said.
Preparation began in September, with every student reading “The Diary of a Young Girl,” watching “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” completing U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum lessons and meeting Holocaust survivor and educator Renate Frydman.
“We have been working together to create an ensemble across technicians and the actors, to make sure that they are a unified group that understand, the weight of this work,” Sparrow-Knapp said.
As director, Sparrow-Knapp said she also wanted to make sure the Jewish elements of the play were handled with accuracy and respect. To that end, the cast and crew worked with Rav Aubrey Glazer of Beth Abraham Synagogue in Dayton to understand the Jewish faith, and the customs and history represented in the play.
“I am not Jewish, and I felt like we needed to work with a Rabbi,” she said. “Rav Aubrey taught us the prayers, how to do the ceremonies correctly, how to light the menorah, how to do everything we need to do, so that we could come at it with reverence from education.”
On stage at the Legend, the tech crew have constructed a set that aims to mimic the cramped quarters in which the Franks lived with Fritz Pfeffer and Hermann, Auguste and Peter Van Pels (whom Anne called “Mr. Dussel” and “the Van Daans” in her diary); the crew were guided by images from a virtual tour of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. But Sparrow-Knapp said the production intentionally stops short of verisimilitude in one key way: no Nazi insignia will be displayed on-stage.
“When we spoke with Renata Frydman, she told us the insignia can be a point of terror for Jewish people,” Sparrow-Knapp said. “We don’t want anyone to be terrorized. The three men who arrive at the end, they’ll have masks over their faces, but we will know who they are.”
And though the cast and crew are aware that the story of Anne Frank — a talented, thoughtful and witty writer who, by her own written admission, was a “chatterbox” — ended in 1944 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Sparrow-Knapp maintains that “The Diary of Anne Frank” is “not a play about death.”
“This play is about people who want to live,” she said. “These people are fighting like mad to live, and they’re doing what they have to do to live.”
Crew member and student Raven Caldwell said that perspective on the play makes the work feel “powerful.”
“It’s conveying a message of people who wanted to survive, even though their nationality was taken away from them by people who didn’t even see them as people,” Caldwell said.
“This is an old story that we’re telling, but it’s also really relevant today with everything going on in the world; people just hate other humans for existing,” cast and crew member Noah Ramirez added.
During their research, the young thespians learned how Nazi policies used bureaucratic language to mask brutality — including the word “deportation,” a term they all recognize from contemporary news. The discovery, they said, evoked a harsh parallel.
“All of the various horrible things that are currently happening in the world, if you think about it, are very similar to the events that happened prior to this play starting,” crew member Adrian Benedict said. “If we do not learn and study our history, we will repeat it.
“It’s kind of scary, honestly,” said Robyn Douglass, who plays Otto Frank. “Even today, I got in an argument with one of my classmates over drawing a swastika on his paper and thinking it was funny.”
“People are forgetting that Nazis are bad, and they need to remember,” added cast member Ram Dobson.
Outside of situating the play in its historical context, the cast and crew said getting to know Anne, her family and the others she wrote about in her diary, and aiming to embody them all, has been a different kind of education.
“It’s emotionally overwhelming, in a way, because we understand the significance [of the play], but it’s something that needs to be remembered,” Hannah Finney, who plays Margot Frank, said.
“It can be hard to portray something that really happened, because you want the message to come across as clearly as possible, and you don’t want to mess it up,” added Rocket Cowperthwaite, who plays the Franks’ helper, Mr. Kraler.
For Era Creepingbear, who plays Edith Frank, the scourge of Holocaust denial, too, has impressed itself upon the minds of the cast and crew.
“Antisemitic attitudes have never really left the U.S.,” Creepingbear said. “I guess something I’m afraid of is that if people already doubt that [the Holocaust] even happened, doing a play of those events could make it seem like fiction. But we also need to get the message out there, especially because genocides are still happening.”
“And these were real people,” said Antoinette Siegel-Hall, who plays Mrs. Van Daan. “When you look at a photo that’s in black and white, it makes you think of eons ago; seeing the people on stage can make you remember that these people were not different from us.”
Amid the historical lessons they’ve learned and contemporary comparisons they’ve drawn, the young thespians said they’ve also found deep personal connections to the characters and events in “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
“I think it’s reconnected me to my faith, being Jewish,” said Maggie Bullock, who plays Anne Frank. “It’s made me feel how important it is to believe in something, and how bad the Holocaust was.”
“[The play] doesn’t show Anne as a symbol, but an actual person,” cast member James White said. “She was just a teenage girl experiencing war.”
The insistence on Anne as a child, not an icon, has shaped every choice in the production, according to Sparrow-Knapp.
“Anne represents the face of children in war,” she said. “We say, ‘Never again.’ But there are children who are faces of war at this very minute, millions of them.”
For Sparrow-Knapp, that connection between past and present is why the play still matters.
“The world is in a sad state when we feel we need to present the sharp knife of theater to remind us that Nazis are bad and turning in our neighbors is not a great thing to do,” she said. “Theater reflects life. Theater, at the heart of it all, must be truth. This play is a truth.”
Sparrow-Knapp also noted that the performance, while appropriate for all ages, will feature a prop gun and two gunshots, and that the show will not end with a curtain call.
The final two performances of “The Diary of Anne Frank” will be performed Friday, Jan. 16, at 7 p.m., and Saturday, Jan. 17, at 6:30 p.m., at the John Legend Theater. (For those reading the e-edition of the News, the opening performance begins at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 15.) Tickets are $15 for general admission, $10 for seniors and $5 for students and are available online at bit.ly/AnneFrankYS26; a service fee will be charged for each ticket purchased online.
Accompanying the show is a shoe drive, spearheaded by Elyssa Bullock and the YS Schools Arts Boosters, who are partnering with Funds2Orgs to collect gently worn, used or new shoes. Funds2Orgs works with micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries, where donated shoes are sold locally to support small businesses and families. Those planning to attend are asked to bring a pair of shoes to donate; collection bins will be available in the theater lobby before each performance.
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
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