Anne Frank at Triad Stage

Triad Stage's 2006/7 season kicked off last night with what may be the most depressing play of all time: The Diary of Anne Frank.

I swear I wanted to cry from the opening moments, as the Franks and van Danns entered the annex - which surprised me in a way. I feel as though I was born knowing Anne Frank's story. I somehow thought that the familiarity would lessen the sting.

Perhaps the hardest thing about Anne's story is not the potential that was lost in her death, but the ways in which she was so ordinary. We can all relate to our first romantic feelings, to teenage rebellion, and the kind of petty interpersonal conflict that comes in any cohabitation.

In the big picture view, Anne Frank's story is unnervingly present with headlines occurring daily about modernized blood libel charges and the thoughtlessly invoked memory of Hitler in Mumbai's Hitler Cafe and an Italian brochure which used the mocking Auschwitz slogan, "work makes you free".

Anne's final diary entry was, coincidentally, on the exact same day that my mother was born. How quickly we forget.