By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be cooped up and hiding from the Nazis the way that Anne Frank and seven other people did?

Short of being sealed into a secret annex in Amsterdam yourself, the closest way you can find out is by attending an Eveoke Dance Theatre production of Anne Frank: Soul of a Young Girl, which my colleague Linda Cohen reviews in an article linked to this one.

Eveoke’s new theatre on the west side of 10^th Street, just south of Broadway, was configured for this production in such a manner that the audience feels as if it actually is living in the attic with the Franks and associates.  The walls of the stage were made of long slats of unfinished wood, which dancers climb at some points in the production to the high ceiling.  A large crate of the same unfinished wood provides the character Anne with a place to confide her secret thoughts to a diary.

As for the audience, nearly every seat in the theatre is encased in a separate enclosure made of the same rough wood, giving attendees the feeling that they are sitting in a little coves of the annex, watching but not interacting with their roommates.

Being heavier than I should be (just ask my wife!), I initially took a seat on the end of a row because it was less enclosed, and I didn’t want to feel squeezed in while I took notes in the darkness.  But during the second and final intermission, I thought better of this and took an encased seat in the very top row.  I was glad I did because it helped me gain greater insight from a tactile standpoint into what was happening in front of me.

As the moods changed on stage, from quarrelsomeness, to silliness, to amorousness, to apprehension, to fear, to dread, recorded music of the Kronos Quartet changed accordingly.  Sometimes, when the sense of danger was palpable, the characters would retreat on stage to their own spaces against the slatted walls.

Likewise, I could feel myself shrinking into my own enclosure from time to time as the music heightened my apprehensiveness that something terribly bad was about to happen.  Unable to control the environment in front of me, or the sounds surrounding me, I at least could retreat to a familiar place, my own little crate.  I was familiar with its contours; with its feels, so it, at least, was comfortingly unchanging.   

I know, I know, a psychologist might say I was retreating to the safety of the womb!  The dance performance is that powerful.

But even in my enclosure, I was not completely safe.  The risers on which the seats had been placed vibrated from audience movement.  At one point, a dancer representing death—made to look like a bald, extremely pale concentration camp inmate—slithered down the central aisle way to the stage, so slowly and quietly that she went unnoticed by many people in the audience transfixed by the ever changing action on stage.  However, she gave a start to those, like me, whose seats were close enough to the aisle to notice.   Brrrr!

Although there were two intermissions, identified as such in the program, the audience was never quite sure when these intermissions took place, owing to the fact that the dancers remained on stage.  Were they resting as characters?  Or as dancers?  And were we, like them, confined to this attic environment?

Uncertain of the answers, many members of the audience remained glued inside their enclosures.  And when the performance ended, there also was uncertainty. On the night I attended, the  audience neither clapped nor departed, but instead remained contemplatively in their seats, trying to absorb all that had transpired in front, and within, them.