preacher, had a special bent. But I knew enough about acting (I’d begun studying Stanislavski) to try to impose some discipline. I spent months reading about the Franks, imagining what it was like to live crammed in an attic for two years, forced to tiptoe all day long. I conducted sense- and emotion-memory exercises, trying to conjure tears, and sat for days in a radio studio recording passages from the diary. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. The sentence became a mantra.
The night we moved into the Fulton we scoured the backstage for props to transform our plain gray set into the Franks’ Amsterdam annex. We hauled a bucket of paint onstage, a Mexican flag, utter junk. But I painstakingly put up pictures of movie stars on the wall in Anne’s room and came into the theater well before call each night to sit on her narrow mattress and summon her spirit. My devotion to Anne was a combination of ego and homage: I wanted to be as famous as she was. At the same time I felt immense pity for her, for all of them.
I had a crush on Anne’s Peter, too. In my case he was a sweet Mennonite boy with blond hair, a wispy moustache, and a beautiful singing voice. Our director so worshipped him (Mann’s Tadzio comes to mind) that he refused to let us rehearse with one another and instead conducted private sessions in which the director played all other relevant parts. The first time Peter and I ran our scenes together was onstage in front of an audience. I awaited his kiss as eagerly as the original Anne must have. Bathed in blue light, he leaned into me, and I felt the soft hairs of his mustache and then his rouged lips on my mouth, and afterward I floated out of his room as if on air.
Early the next morning my mother burst into my bedroom waving the local paper. “Anne Frank Is a Gift from Leslie Stainton,” the headline read. For a day I again floated on air, and then it was over, our short run, the marquee billing, the star’s dressing room. I went back to my life. Alive, golden-haired, insecure. I waited for another Anne Frank, but she never came.
In those moments before performance each evening, when I sat alone in Anne’s room and thought about the night ahead, I felt for the first time the uncanny power of that space. The Fulton was mostly empty: maybe a house or stage manager in the wings, but there were no other actors, just me and the character I desperately sought to invoke. I doubt I ever got her. I doubt my Anne was a gift to much of anyone (there’s a reason I no longer act), but something did take place in that groping, in my desire to be her, to take on Anne Frank’s suffering at a time in my life when already I’d outlived her.
For the length of our run the Fulton stage became that iconic attic space. Theater exists in the moment when action becomes metaphor, a friend reminds me. I knew then that this place was somehow holy (I would eventually learn Grotowski’s phrase), and I had come to worship. Perhaps the sparse audiences we attracted did too, though I suspect they were there primarily because we’d dragooned them into coming. One night the director, who also played Otto Frank, asked me to ad lib the name of a friend of his who was in the audience that evening, and I did, ashamed but obedient.
Anne for me was real, and I tried desperately to make her so. The power of the actor, Michael Goldman writes, is dangerous, and we harness it at our peril. I was giddy with authority: my name on the theater, my body onstage. The spotlight, the wig, the yellow star I’d sewn by myself onto my sweater. The gesture was heartfelt: I wanted to bring Anne back to life. Anyone who takes on that role is hoping to resurrect the dead.
Anne Frank was my last production with that company. I never got together with the boy who played Peter, but I did date his brother. The director went on producing Christian plays for another three decades, until one day he was charged with corrupting minors and arrested. Two teenage boys accused him of holding nude acting classes in his basement. The director pleaded no contest and was fined and put on probation, and a few months later he killed himself.
Theaters hold emotions, a ghost hunter named Rick Fisher told me one morning as we stood on the Fulton stage together, and “that emotion, that energy, stays here.” I’d asked Rick to show me how he worked, and he’d turned up at the opera house with an infrared camcorder, a digital tape recorder, a thermal scanner, an electromagnetic field meter, a motion sensor, and one assistant. The three of us walked through the basement together and then went upstairs to the stage. It was a summer morning; a couple of crew members were on the pin rail hanging lights. Rick and his friend snapped away, and after a minute or two Rick called out, “Looks like we got a little friend here.” I looked at his camera. There on the screen, beside me, was a white orb, faint but visible. I’ll never know what it was. My former self? Anne Frank? Another actor? Someone who had once felt as I had standing here on this wooden stage, waiting for the lights to dim? Invincible. Reverent. Possessed by a god I am still trying to find.
In his 1827 preface to Cromwell, Victor Hugo wrote that the place where a catastrophe occurs becomes forever afterward a “silent character” in a tragic tale. It is doubtful Christopher Hager thought much about tragedy or character as he ordered workmen to begin dismantling Lancaster’s old jail and workhouse in the summer of 1852, although he did hire a sometime church architect to design the hall he intended to build on the site—an unconscious nod, perhaps, to the gravity of his undertaking.
Hager’s portrait hangs upstairs in the offices of today’s Fulton Theatre, and I’ve studied it more than once, trying to see in the Hapsburg nose and pinched mouth the template for the Hager men I have known in my own lifetime: Christopher’s great-grandson Nat, who did much to save the Fulton from the wrecking ball in the 1960s, and Nat’s son Chris, my old college classmate and friend, who has done his share of backstage work at the Fulton and is the seventh generation of Hager to have served on the vestry of Trinity Lutheran Church. The family’s long sojourn in Lancaster began on September 26, 1764, nine months after the slaughter of the Conestogas, when young Stoffel Heger, a butcher from Hessen-Darmstadt, arrived in the city after crossing the Atlantic with a shipload of fellow immigrants and swearing allegiance to King George the Second. Fourteen years later, Heger—by then Christopher Hager—signed a second oath, renouncing his allegiance to the king and swearing loyalty to the new and independent Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The butcher Hager had three successive wives and eight children, including a boy named Christopher, born in 1800 and baptized, like his siblings, at Trinity Lutheran Church. This second Christopher Hager, the eventual builder of Fulton Hall, was eighteen when his father died and was buried in a small yard adjoining the stately brick sanctuary where two centuries later members of the Hager family would continue to worship. (Not long ago I watched my friend Chris play Jesus in a vacation Bible school pageant at Trinity Lutheran.)
In 1821, three years after his father’s death, Christopher Hager Jr. opened a store near Lancaster’s market and jail and began selling dry goods, queensware, and groceries. His prices were fair, and his buying trips to Philadelphia yielded bargains: a shipment of coffee drenched but not damaged by seawater, a hundred barrels of molasses. Business bloomed. He began extending credit to his customers, and farmers started to invest their cash surpluses with him, making Hager a banker as well as a merchant. He issued loans to friends and family, expanded his store, bought real estate, and perfected a baroque signature not unlike John Hancock’s. In time Hager became president of the Farmers National Bank, president of a volunteer fire company, county treasurer, a manager of the city gas company, a trustee of the local college, an officer in the Lancaster County Colonization Society, and a founder and early manager of the Conestoga Cotton Mills, Lancaster’s midcentury leap into the Industrial Revolution.
Hager wore his sideburns low and his dark hair swept forward onto his face. His nose was long and pronounced, his eyes brown, and when he had his portrait painted shortly after his wedding to the former Catherine Sener, he donned a creamy yellow
