August 29, 2018

When director Stan Zimmerman decided to cast Latino actors in key roles in a new stage production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” he never expected the controversy it would unleash.

Inspired by a news story about a Jewish woman in Los Angeles who created a safe house to shelter undocumented immigrants, Zimmerman intended the casting to draw a contemporary parallel to the immigration crisis in the United States. But when false reports surfaced that he also was replacing the Gestapo with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, he became a target of haters on both sides of the political divide.

Although the publicity has brought attention to the production, which will open next month at the Dorie Theatre in Hollywood, “I would rather have not gone through all of that anxiety,” Zimmerman told the Journal in a break during rehearsals at his home in Los Angeles. “It’s very hurtful to get scary hate mail that’s either calling me a Nazi or a Holocaust denier. I know these are sensitive issues. As a Jew, I’m sensitive to [them], too.”

The play, based on a journal written by Frank while she and her family hid from the Gestapo in a “secret annex” in Amsterdam, has a script identical to the 1997 Broadway version that starred Natalie Portman. Zimmerman explained how the misconception likely arose.

“In our press release, we had an image of ICE. But we never said we were changing the script. People made the leap, and I think certain [outlets] had an agenda.” He cited right-leaning media including the Breitbart News Network and Fox News. “I was shocked when Deadline Hollywood just ran with that. No one called and asked.”

Genesis Ochoa, 16, and David Gurrola, 15, who play Anne Frank and Peter van Daan, have been trying to ignore the “people whose minds you can’t change. There’s no point in arguing with them,” Gurrola said of the internet trolls.

Both actors are of Mexican descent, and neither had read Anne Frank’s diary or the play before they were cast. Ochoa did not learn about the Holocaust in school, and Gurrola said there was “maybe a page” in his history book about it. But Frank’s story resonates with them, and they see parallels with the immigration crisis. “Not too far from us are safe houses, right in our backyard,” Gurrola said. “I have many relatives who are undocumented. Some were even deported.”

Playing Anne’s sister, Margot, is Teddi Schaffer, an Ashkenazi Jew whose mother grew up in Mexico. She isn’t surprised by the controversy, “but I stand behind the project,” she said. “It’s being done in a very respectful manner, all in the name of art and awareness.”

Schaffer grew up “culturally Jewish” in the predominantly Jewish community of Parkland, Fla., where Holocaust studies are part of the curriculum. She hasn’t been able to go back since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, but she has vowed to fight for gun control legislation. “Activism has always been important to me,” she said. “All I care about is getting a platform for gun reform to help those wonderful kids.”

Zimmerman, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home in Southfield, Mich., a largely Jewish suburb of Detroit, revealed he was a victim of bullying, but not because he was Jewish. “As a gay kid, I experienced persecution. I was spit on at school,” he said, noting that the plight of mistreated minorities has always resonated with him because of it. He also has a strong connection to Judaism. “I’m so proud to be Jewish,” he said. “It’s the part of me that gives me humanity.”

Zimmerman, best known for writing for and producing “The Golden Girls,” “Roseanne” and “Gilmore Girls” on TV, has two new shows in the works: an office comedy about three sisters and their dad who run a baseball cap company, and “Silver Foxes,” which he describes as a “gay male ‘Golden Girls.’ ”

He has directed three plays in the last year, most recently the circumcision comedy “A Knife to the Heart.” With “Anne Frank,” he’s managing a much larger cast in a tighter stage space, marked by tape to delineate the doors and walls of the cramped annex. The costuming is of the period, he said, but stylized.

The play’s run is booked for only 15 performances, but Zimmerman would love to extend it or move to another theater. “I think it’s a great education tool, and I would love it to go to schools or have school groups come see it, since it’s not being taught anymore,” he said. “When I grew up, it was a required part of the curriculum.”

Zimmerman believes the play and the diary endure because of the writing. “It’s so beautiful and so moving that someone so young could be so insightful, that she could see the world like that.” he said. “You can’t help but be drawn into the story.”

Its takeaway message remains the same, Zimmerman said: “Never again.” But he also hopes his production and its casting provoke discussion about other issues of man’s inhumanity to man.

“There’s no way you can compare anything to the Holocaust,” he said. “But we can learn from it, open up and talk about issues, and ask ourselves how we can help.”

“The Diary of Anne Frank” runs Sept. 6-23 at the Dorie Theatre in Hollywood. Tickets are $25 online, $30 at the door.

The title may be difficult to remember or even say in the correct order, but the movie “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” based on the book of the same cumbersome name, has become a sleeper hit.

Released on Netflix in early August, the film, set in 1946, tells the story of Juliet Ashton (actress Lily James), a London-based writer who travels to the island of Guernsey in the English Channel to meet a group of locals after learning about a book club (the aforementioned Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society), they formed when the island was occupied by the Germans during World War II.

Published in 2008, the book was written by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows. At Shaffer’s request, Barrows took on editorial revisions requested by the publisher when Shaffer became ill. Shaffer died in early 2008. The book went on to rank No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.

But it was in 2007 when Santa Monica film producer Paula Mazur read a copy of the book’s galley proof and immediately knew she wanted to make it into a film.

Mazur was fresh off a major box-office success with “Nim’s Island,” starring Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin, when she was introduced to Miami-based independent bookseller Mitch Kaplan.

“I always work from plays and books to screen primarily,” Mazur told the Journal in a telephone interview, “and [Kaplan] sent me [the Guernsey galley]. I fell in love with it. I could see the movie and knew how to get it made.”

Together, Mazur and Kaplan — who now run a production company, The Mazur/Kaplan Company — optioned the book nine months before it even hit bookshelves. However, the wheels of the moviemaking process grind slowly. While Studio Canal eventually bought the film, “we went through three or four financiers, four directors and seven leading ladies,” before James took on the role of Ashton and Mike Newell agreed to be the director, Mazur said.

Mazur said it was fortuitous that James eventually landed the role. Nobody could have known that the actress would become a major star in the last couple of years, with roles in “Downton Abbey,” “Cinderella,” “Mamma Mia,” “Baby Driver” and “The Darkest Hour.”

“I’m so thrilled it’s Lily,” Mazur said. “She just embodied Juliet in the best way. She’s an absolutely beautiful specimen of humankind, and yet she’s accessible. There’s a little bit of every woman in her. She represents us all looking for our authentic self and asking, ‘How can I live my most authentic life?’ ”

Mazur said she was drawn to “Guernsey” for several reasons. “It’s an epistolary novel — a novel of letters — and the voices of the individual characters were so incredibly specific and well drawn, that I kind of fell in love with everybody in the book,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can so see these people and would love to watch them on the screen.’ ”

Mazur was also interested in being able to tell a WWII story that hadn’t been told before. “This [story] had a lot of romance and breadth and history, and yet it was this incredibly personal story of transformation for Juliet and also about what is family and what is community, which is what the [Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie] Society was.”

Mazur, a member of the IKAR congregation in Los Angeles, said she was struck by the book’s story of how people come together to get through extremely difficult, dark times. “It’s through community,” she said, “and I feel that this community that we have at IKAR is representative of that. It is a strong community, and our value system is about making the world better and about love and community. I feel like that is in the movie too — that’s what the [Guernsey] Society is.”

Mazur said she also wanted to fulfill a personal mission in making a film set around WWII. “My family was definitely touched by WWII,” she said. “My maternal side [of the family] is from Austria, and they were sent to concentration camps and killed.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Mazur said that after the war “New York was holding the remains of European Jewry in its hands. You could feel it everywhere. When we went to buy clothes, my mother would say, ‘Don’t look at the [tattoos] on survivors’ arms.’ ”

For Mazur, a graduate of NYU’s film school, “Guernsey” was an opportunity to answer the part of her that had always asked, ‘How do I feel about [the war]? What do I want to say and not repeat already trodden territory?’ ”

“I like to tell stories that definitely talk about the problem but also offer solutions or hope or a silver lining, and this felt like that for me,” she said. “And there were Jewish people from Guernsey sent to concentration camps. That’s not part of the movie, but it is part of Guernsey’s history.”

Mazur/Kaplan’s immediate past film was 2017’s “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” about Charles Dickens writing “A Christmas Carol.” It starred Dan Stevens and Christopher Plummer and was “made by a bunch of Jews,” Mazur quipped. Next up for her is “All the Bright Places,” starring Elle Fanning in an adaptation of Jennifer Nivens’ young-adult novel about teen depression.

For now, Mazur is enjoying the success of “Guernsey,” which grossed more than $18 million in theaters outside the United States before its Netflix debut.

“I love that it comes back to community,” she said. “It’s really about people who [dealt with] very difficult experiences through this communal experience of a book club, even if it was just for a short while every week — where they could remember their humanity.”

When the Pasadena Playhouse opened in 1917, it took over an abandoned burlesque stage, but this year, as the theater marks its centennial, it is attracting a more discriminating audience.

The Playhouse’s façade bears the proud title, “Official State Theatre of California,” an honor conferred by the state legislature in 1937, after the company performed the canon of 36 Shakespeare plays on a single stage for the first time in the United States.

Recently, however, the venerable institution had fallen on hard times. In 2010, it led for bankruptcy and though it survived, two years ago, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that the Playhouse was “struggling for survival.”

At that point, Danny Feldman came aboard with the title of producing artistic director and the assignment to right the listing ship.

“I was the first new leader in 20 years, and I saw my job as rebuilding the Playhouse for the next 100 years,” Feldman, 38, said in a phone interview.

Asked for a diagnosis of the Playhouse’s current state of health, Feldman said, “We had a [financial] surplus the past year and we’ll have one next year.”

Feldman grew up in West Hills in the San Fernando Valley in a “culturally Jewish” family, with an Israeli-born father and American mother, and studied at the Kadimah Hebrew Academy.

When he accepted the Playhouse position, he was aware — like most Angelenos — of Pasadena’s reputation as a city settled and run by WASPs who did not particularly welcome Jewish newcomers.

Pasadena was initially settled in the 1870s by wealthy families from the East Coast and Midwest looking for warmer winter climes. The new community prided itself on its reputation as a bastion of white Protestant culture, which enacted restrictive covenants to try and stay that way.

One of its leading citizens, Robert Millikan, Nobel Laureate and president of Caltech, lauded Pasadena as “the western-most outpost of Nordic civilization.”

However, over the past 50 years, Pasadena, like most of the rest of the country, has become more diverse and so has the Playhouse’s theatrical productions. Where once plays revolved mainly around the romantic and other tribulations of the upper classes, the upcoming season reflects Feldman’s more adventurous taste.

Opening the new season on Sept. 5 is the regional premiere of “Native Gardens,” a new comedy by Karen Zacarias and directed by Jason Alexander. The play centers on two neighboring families in Washington, D.C., whose feud over their respective gardens and common fence line escalates into a “war of the hoses.”

On Oct. 17, the ghostly “Woman in Black” opens, and arrives in Pasadena directly from London’s West End. The show has been keeping audiences on the edge of their seats for 28 years.

Scheduled for next February is “Ragtime,” whose scenes of poor Jewish and other immigrants seeking a new life in America are seen by Feldman as “wildly relevant” to the present.

Feldman also is reaching out to neighboring Jewish communities, particularly the Jewish Federation of San Gabriel and Pomona Valley. For instance, for the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Federation’s Jewish Community Players join the Playhouse actors for a presentation appropriate to the occasion.

Among the strongest supporters of the Playhouse is the Jewish community of Pasadena. Feldman said the reason for that affinity is that the theater is about contesting ideas and “arguing is in our DNA.”

For tickets and information, call (626) 356 – 7529.