I thought I knew what The Diary of Anne Frank was about.
I'd read the script. I understood the story — the hiding, the hope, the ending we all know is coming. I had a version of it in my head. It was thoughtful, respectful to the story and the history.
Then we had our first cast meeting, and we all read it out loud.
The words became live voices. The voices became living people. The show I had in my mind fell apart and reassembled into something else entirely.
What arrived was this: The Diary of Anne Frank isn't about the Holocaust. It's about dehumanization — the process of it, the practice of it. The methodical work of convincing a society that a group of people are something less than human. That happens before the separation, before the camps, before the atrocities.
It happens in language. In policy. In the gradual withdrawal of ordinary rights from ordinary people.
Dehumanization isn't ancient history. It's a reusable method — deployed in any era, in any country, pointed at any "other." Once you understand how it works, you can see it being assembled in real time.
That's what I want you to see when you come to Theatre Tulsa this August. Not a historical tragedy at a safe distance. A family living their ordinary lives against extraordinary forces trying to make them less than human.
That's a story for any moment.
— Jarrod
P.S. — Tickets for ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ are on sale now. Get yours here. I hope you'll join us.