Roneet Aliza Rahamim says she was born to play the role of Anne Frank.
The 31-year-old Palo Alto native will do just that in the Palo Alto Players’ production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which opens next weekend. It will be the second time this year that Rahamim will inhabit the character of the famous Jewish teenager who hid from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam during World War II, leaving behind a poignant diary that has become the most-read document of Holocaust literature.
Rahamim also played Anne in a production at the Addison-Penzak JCC in Los Gatos in April. But on three previous occasions, she auditioned for the part without success. In one of those productions, she ended up working as a dramaturg, helping to translate the play from script to stage. That allowed her to focus on Anne’s character as well as the linguistic nuances of the characters.
“You have to connect with what their world was. Some of that Jewish history is lost — the tunes and things that we pass down are very different from the Judaism of that time,” she said. “It’s not like you can just Google a clip from that time of people singing Ashkenazi melodies.”
When Rahamim takes the stage in the title role on Nov. 5, she will be looking out at theatergoers young enough to relate to some of the daily challenges Anne faced hiding in that attic in war-torn Amsterdam, and others old enough to have personal memories of that dark period in human history.
The key, she said, is to present a portrayal that is relatable for both groups — especially the teens, many of whom will have read Anne’s diary in school.
“I think it’s probably more important for the kids to be able to connect to me and not say I’m an adult who doesn’t get it,” Rahamim said in an interview before a recent rehearsal. “I really try terribly hard to portray Anne as a 13-year-old, not as a character, going through what she’s going through.”
Rahamim has had plenty of experience depicting a girl of that age. Three years ago, she starred as a 12-year-old Brooklynite in a City Lights Theater production of “Coney Island Christmas.” Rahamim said some of the jobs she’s taken while building her acting career — including stints as a nanny and at a preschool — have helped her keep the frame of reference of a girl in her early teens.
Rahamim has also drawn on her Jewish background in preparing to play Anne Frank. Her father was born in Israel to parents who immigrated from Iraq. Her mother is American-born but has roots in Greece and Romania. Rahamim speaks to her parents in Hebrew, the language she grew up with at home.
Surprisingly, although Rahamim attended Mid-Peninsula Jewish Community Day School in Palo Alto — now the Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School — she never read Anne Frank’s diary as a child, although she did visit the Amsterdam house in her youth.
Reading the story as an adult, Rahamim said she felt a kinship with Anne and her story. “I could really connect with the young girl I was at that age,” she said. “All those feelings, all that energy. That’s why I felt like I was born to play this role and why it’s been on my bucket list forever. And it’s a way of connecting to my Jewish heritage.”
Director Dennis Lickteig, who first read “The Diary of a Young Girl” as a Catholic school eighth-grader in the late 1960s, said Rahamim’s background allows her to “bring a lot of authenticity” to the role.
“I could tell when she came in to read it that it was a part of her. She brings the Jewish experience,” he said in a phone interview.
The play presented by the Palo Alto Players is based on an adaptation by Wendy Kesselman that opened in New York in 1997 with Natalie Portman as Anne. The original adaptation premiered in New York in 1955, with Susan Strasberg in the lead role.
Rahamim said the Kesselman version “includes some of the things her father deemed theater audiences were not ready to see in the 1950s,” such as Anne going through puberty. The newer adaptation is less melodramatic, Rahamim said, and better develops the characters of the seven other people who shared the cramped attic with Anne for two years as they hid from the Nazis.
Lickteig said the newer version, which runs about a half-hour shorter than the original, focuses more on characters such as Anne’s mother, who was probably having a nervous breakdown during their time in the attic, and is more open about Anne’s rebelliousness. The older version was told in large part from the father’s perspective.
“The characters are a little less saintly in this version, you see the warts and all,” the director said. “The father had a lot more control over the original, and the people seemed a little too good to be true in some cases, especially him. The original centered on his relationship with Anne. In this version he doesn’t indulge her as much as he does in the original.”
Rahamim, who has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Marymount Manhattan College, said playing Anne satisfies one of her goals on the stage.
“As an actor, what are the great roles I wanted to connect with?” she asked. “And I was getting older, so I knew I had to do this now.”
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Nov. 5-20 (preview Nov. 4). $17-44.