CYCLORAMA

A troupe of teenage actors confronts Anne Frank’s legacy.

“We don’t need the Nazis to destroy us; we’re destroying ourselves.” Langer takes Otto Frank’s chilling remark as the epigraph for an ambitious novel that reminds readers that the social and political seeds of Nazism have not been obliterated. It’s 1982, and in a suburban high school north of Chicago, 10 students are vying for a part in The Diary of Anne Frank, the annual spring play. Who will be chosen, and who will star, depends on the whims of their director, Tyrus Densmore. Abusive, predatory, and manipulative, Densmore is filled with shame and anger. Mired in an unhappy marriage, the father of a son with mental illness, and a failed actor himself, he knows that the power he wields over his vulnerable students “was inversely proportional to the power he had over his own life.” The teenage characters include some predictable types—bully, nerd, slut, rebel, closeted gay; a few are arrogant and entitled, others are needy and wounded. Insecure about who they are, they perform for one another, not only on stage. As one boy later admits, he “often had trouble telling the difference between when he was feeling an emotion or just acting it out.” Langer focuses each chapter on one character’s role (Anne, Mr. Frank, Peter Van Daan), underscoring the novel’s connection to the play, which becomes more overt when we meet up with the cast members in 2016. No longer angst-riddled teens, they are adults in their 50s who, it turns out, have been indelibly shaped by their performance in Anne Frank and, they painfully realize, by their interactions with Densmore. The drama of the second half of the novel recalls the persecution and victimization that led to Anne’s tragic end and raises the novel’s overarching question: What responsibility does each of us have to one another?

A somber warning about the insidious consequences of hatred.