IF YOU GOWhat: "The Diary of Anne Frank."When: 7 p.m. Thursday, March 23, March 29-30; 8 p.m. March 24, March 31; 2 p.m. March 25.Where: Dalton Little Theatre, 210 N. Pentz St., Dalton, Ga.Admission: $15 adults, $12 seniors, $10 students, $5 children.Phone: 706-226-6618.Website: www.daltonlittletheatre.com.
While prison-camp incarceration may have spelled the end for Anne Frank, it only began the awareness of her chronicles of the Frank family's existence in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.
First published in 1947, it was translated into English as "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" in 1952 and adapted to the stage in 1956.
That stage version, "The Diary of Anne Frank," will be presented by the Dalton Little Theatre beginning Thursday and continuing through the following weekend.
"The precise quality of the new play," the New York Herald Tribune wrote of the original stage adaptation, "... is the quality of glowing, ineradicable life -- life in its warmth, its wonder, its spasms of anguish and its wild and flaring humor ... Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett have fashioned a wonderfully sensitive and theatrically craftsmanlike narrative out of the real-life legacy left us by a spirited and straightforward Jewish girl ... as bright and shining as a banner."
The play, taken from Frank's diary, covers the period between June 14, 1942, and Aug. 1, 1944. It details life for the Dutch-Jewish family -- Anne, her sister, Margot, her father, Otto, and her mother, Edith, plus the van Pel family and Fritz Pfeffer -- in the sealed-off annex of her father's office building in Amsterdam.
The family was betrayed in 1944, resulting in its members being deported to Nazi concentration camps. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen, Germany, of a typhus infection in March 1945, about two weeks before the camp's liberation by British troops.
Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive the war, edited the original book.
The original Broadway production, written by Goodrich and Hackett, won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, Critics Circle Award and many other awards. The 1997 revival also garnered Tony, Theater World and New York Drama Circle awards.