A new take on Anne Frank at Kansas City Repertory Theatre

Think of it as new meets old.

Kansas City Repertory Theatre is staging “The Diary of Anne Frank,” a familiar title first presented on Broadway in 1955 and a splendid example of the traditional well-made play.

But its director, Marissa Wolf, is a young theater artist who before joining the Rep’s staff in late 2014 was staging experimental theater in San Francisco.

So how does an alternative-minded director approach a traditional piece? First of all, Wolf, 33, points out that it’s not as if she has never staged traditional shows. She has, including a production of “The Music Man.”

Second of all, she’s working with a team of Bay Area designers inclined to approach the material with a fresh eye.

But first, here’s Wolf’s 30-second bio: She grew up in Connecticut. She studied theater at Vassar College in upstate New York. She skipped grad school but won a two-year directing fellowship at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. After that, she applied to be the artistic director of the small Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco and won the job.

At Berkeley she worked as an assistant to notable visiting playwright/directors, including Mary Zimmerman, Frank Galati and Lisa Peterson.

“Being in the room with all of these magnificent directors as their assistant was very powerful and exhilarating,” Wolf said during a Saturday morning green room interview. “I also was the assistant to the artistic director and the casting director, so there was administrative work that went along with the fellowship. It allowed me to be inside of high-level conversations about season planning and artistic vision, which ultimately kind of launched me into the world.”

At Crowded Fire, she produced and directed new work that found different ways to tell stories with an emphasis on diversity.

“When I became an artistic director, I thought: ‘So this is what my life is,’ ” she said. ‘ “This is what I’m doing in theater.’ That was an exciting moment of recognizing that I was not drawn to a freelancer’s life. I was really drawn to being inside of an institution.”

So her position at the Rep satisfies her in two ways: It’s an established institution, and her job, director of new work, allows her to continue seeking out new playwrights.

But for the moment her focus is “The Diary of Anne Frank,” adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize.

When Rep artistic director Eric Rosen approached her about doing “Anne Frank,” “I felt very moved and excited … that he would offer me this amazing opportunity to do a classic,” Wolf said. “Often I think it’s very easy as a young director to stay within the straight and narrow of new works and not have the opportunity to branch out.

“But I was hesitant, based on the Holocaust themes, because it was not something I felt I could live with for a year. I worried that it would be too hard to have to look at the themes of the Holocaust inside of ‘Anne Frank’ — the reality of the loss of life.”

Wolf, whose father is Jewish, said the Holocaust was rarely discussed when she was growing up. But she did hear stories about relatives who fled the pogroms in Russia and later fled Germany. And she was aware that many didn’t make it out and were killed.

“All I know of those folks are these sort of beautiful, sepia family photos and some stories about rabbis who were in our family,” she said. “I think (the Holocaust) was very present for my grandparents and thereby for all of us. It was present and silent. You recognize, even as a child, what those silences are.

“My grandmother had actually moved from Minsk, Russia, and her family made it to Mexico. Her first languages were Yiddish and Spanish. And then they moved up to Laredo, Texas. But that was something she never really spoke about, fleeing.”

She recalled learning about the Holocaust in fourth or fifth grade.

“And I remember saying to my dad, ‘If that ever happened again I would just pretend not to be Jewish,’ ” she said. “And one of the characters in the play, Peter, says that very thing.”

Anne Frank was 15 when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. For two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands she had lived with her family and others in an apartment hidden from view. During that time she kept a diary, which survived. Her father, Otto, edited it and published it as a book in 1947.

It became a global best-seller and an important document of the Holocaust. But there was more than one version. Anne, believing she might be writing for posterity, rewrote parts of her diary and added notes, some of which were critical of her early diary entries. Eventually the different versions were compiled in a new book (the “critical edition”), which included entries in which Anne talked about sexual feelings and was critical of her mother.

Using some of the material from the revised version, playwright Wendy Kesselman adapted the Goodrich-Hackett play. It was produced on Broadway in 1997. And that’s the version Rep audiences will see.

In casting the show, Wolf hired two out-of-towners. The rest are based here. And they include three veteran character actors: Merle Moores, Peggy Friesen and Victor Raider-Wexler.

“Bringing in Merle, Peggy and Victor, our Kansas City veterans, the three of them carry a really profound and deep understanding of life and joy and loss,” Wolf said.

After Wolf moved here, she wasted little time investigating the other theaters in town. She admires work she has seen at the Unicorn, Spinning Tree Theatre and Kansas City Actors Theatre. And she was stunned by the quality of acting.

The Rep’s production of “Angels in America,” which included Friesen as Ethel Rosenberg and Mark Robbins as Roy Cohn, was a revelation.

“My first real encounter with that was in ‘Angels in America’ and what Peggy and Mark did with those roles,” she said. “I could have sat and watched them all day. I was blown out of the water. And I thought: ‘OK, I’ve landed in an awesome city.’ ”

This story was originally published January 28, 2016 at 2:00 AM with the headline "A new take on Anne Frank at Kansas City Repertory Theatre."