Community’s theater program will reprise “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the 50th annual Illinois High School Theatre Festival on Illinois State University’s campus Jan. 8-10.

In her second year leading Community’s theater program, Ms. Cassie Adelman earned a festival selection for the fall play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which ran in October and now returns after weeks of waiting to learn whether the cast and crew would be invited to perform it again.

“It was six weeks between when we finished our last run of the show,” Adelman said, “to when we were even told if we would be reviving it for theater fest.”

Adelman submitted the play to the festival, she said, because she wanted the program to share its themes beyond Community’s stage.

“I chose ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ because it felt timely,” Adelman said. “It was the message that I wanted to send of empathy and compassion in times of great strife and looking out for our marginalized students.”

Retired Community theatre director Mrs. Kevin Yale Vernon said being selected to perform at the festival is “a real honor.”

In her 20 years as a director, Vernon said she only took two shows selected to the annual festival. For Adelman and theater program’s cast and crew to earn a selection, Vernon said, is a “mark of quality and respect.”

For junior Vedant Thakur, who plays Peter Van Daan, a teenage boy in hiding who becomes close with Anne, the selection means the work the group put into the show will reach a wider audience.

“To the whole cast and crew, it’s a pretty big deal,” Thakur said. “It’s pretty rare that you get to take your show to a statewide festival.”

Thakur said revisiting the production months later brings a different challenge than opening a show for the first time, especially when it comes to staying performance-ready.

“The biggest thing is for actors,” Thakur said, “keeping your lines memorized and your blocking about where you’re going on stage.”

“But for everyone,” Thakur said, “you kind of have to get back into the mode or the vibe of the show you’re doing.”

To prepare for a potential revival, Adelman said she had students keep the material fresh even after the set was struck.

“Just in case,” Adelman said, “I had my actors come together and run lines two or three times.”

She also told students working on props, set and costumes to put items away “but remember where they are in case we get selected,” Adelman said.

That preparation matters because the festival performance brings technical challenges beyond relearning lines.

At Community, the show was staged in a thrust configuration, meaning the stage extends into the audience with seating on three sides. At the festival, the production must be adapted for a proscenium theater, where the audience faces the stage from one side like a “frame,” Adelman said.

Adapting to the new space affects sightlines, entrances and spacing, Adelman said, and the crew will have limited time to load in and assemble the set before show time.

Thakur said returning to the show can be demanding, but he sees it as a chance to reconnect with a story the cast and crew invested in.

“In this case, Anne Frank, it’s not easy,” Thakur said. “It’s more fun, if anything, because you miss the show sometimes when you get attached to it. And I think this is just a one last [opportunity for] closure, to do this show one more time.”

With conflicts and tension dominating the news, Thakur said the play’s themes feel especially urgent now.

But the junior pointed to a line Anne says near the end of the play as the message he hopes audiences take with them: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Community’s performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 10, at the Center for the Performing Arts on Illinois State University’s campus and is open to festival attendees.