Actress says playing Anne Frank is ‘a rite of passage’

Sara Farb plays Anne Frank

Sara Farb did not have to look far for inspiration when she heard she would be playing Anne Frank at this year’s Stratford Festival. 

Farb’s grandmother, Helen Yermus, and Farb’s great-grandmother endured the Stutthof concentration camp and survived. Like Anne Frank, Yermus kept a diary as a young girl. 

“It’s been ingrained in my upbringing,” Farb tells The CJN in Stratford, during the week of the show’s dress rehearsal. “I thankfully know quite a bit about [my grandmother’s] experience and I’m glad about that. 

“I would understand if she didn’t want to talk about it, but it’s so important that she does.”

Farb and her grandmother will speak in a program before the performance on June 10 about Yermus’ experiences in the Shoah. Yermus was born in Lithuania and resided in the Kovno Ghetto before her transfer to Stutthof. 

“It’s so important to expose everybody to as many survivors as possible,” Farb says. “I’m so, so proud that she’s agreed to share [her story] with everybody and I’m so amazed by her.”

Farb considers playing Anne Frank “a rite of passage” as a Jewish actor. 

Now, she will play the character in two different shows: in The Diary of Anne Frank at Stratford’s Avon Theatre, which opens May 28, and in The Secret Annex at The Segal Centre in Montreal next winter. The Secret Annex envisions an alternate universe where Anne survived and is trying to get her diary published.

Jillian Keiley, who helmed Alice Through the Looking-Glass at last year’s festival, directs the Stratford production.

To prepare for the role, Farb read Anne’s diary various times, as well as other biographies. Still, she says the production is not as much a re-enactment of the story of Anne’s two-year stay hidden in the Achterhuis, a secret annex above her father’s office, but a telling that deals with how the story has endured through the generations.

“The way we open the show is widely unconventional,” Farb says. “It lifts the curse of treating it like reverential, historical presentation. It becomes much, much easier to insert ourselves into the experiences of these people.”

Farb is now one of Stratford’s most in-demand actors, after well-received festival turns as Cordelia in King Lear and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. This season, beyond her role as Anne Frank, she also stars in She Stoops to Conquer (opening June 4) and The Last Wife (opening August 14). 

When Farb began rehearsals for The Diary of Anne Frank back in February, she was at the tail end of R-E-B-E-C-C-A, a one-woman show she wrote and performed at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. The show was about Farb’s sister, who has a developmental delay, and the stigmas of living with a disability. 

“I had to condition my brain to exist in such different ways of thinking,” Farb says, adding that it was a relief to be around other actors again. “It really made me appreciate the necessity of having a company.”

Meanwhile, the play’s staging coincides with an exhibition on the Holocaust and Anne’s story. Featuring artifacts from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the exhibit will open at the Stratford Perth Museum on June 6.

Even with three productions on her plate this summer and fall, Farb says she still has her mind on writing plays – another element that connects her with the young Anne.

“To have a finger in different pots is comforting,” she says. “It still makes me feel at ease to know that I’m capable of something if this all falls through.”

Otto, Anne’s father and the family’s only survivor, helped bring Anne’s diary to publication. Originally printed in 1947, The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 30 million copies to date and been translated to more than 60 languages. 

Farb, 28, is likely one of the oldest actors to play Anne, who died in the Bergen-Belzen concentration camp at just 15. However, the young woman possessed a maturity and eloquence that bridges the age gap, Farb says. 

“I don’t think I ever really clued in to how prophetic she was, or how wise,” she says. “In her writing she’ll alternate between such beautiful metaphorical imagery, and then trash Mrs. van Daan for something so trivial and show what a girl she is.

“Now as an adult, I can appreciate why that’s so remarkable in a young person. She’s just such a special person.”

 

The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by Jillian Keiley, runs at Stratford Festival May 28 to Oct. 10. www.stratfordfestival.ca