Diary Girl

Tonight’s premiere of And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the Life of Anne Frank might not show the same Anne Frank you knew in high school. But the show is, in its way, more of the same from the Coterie Theatre — the same kind of challenging material, inventive staging, professional polish and out-of-the-ordinary thinking about what young persons’ (read: kiddie) theater can be. Tonight’s opening is a documentary-inspired life of the 20th century’s most famous teen diarist, complete with videos of Holocaust survivors who knew Frank, real-life scenes reimagined for live actors, and some multimedia give-and-take between the onstage cast and the pretaped survivors. Author James Still hails from Pomona, Kansas, went to KU and wrote the excellent Iron Kisses, which knocked ’em dead at the Unicorn Theatre last year. Tonight’s premiere is at 7 p.m. at the Coterie (on the first level of Crown Center, 2450 Grand, 816-474-6552). The play then runs mornings and afternoons through October 14.

Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Sept. 16. Continues through Oct. 24, 2008