Anne Frank, courtesy of the Anne Frank House and Museum website.

This weekend, Nautilus Music-Theater, a Knight Arts grantee, remounted their 2006 Ivey-winning production of “I Am Anne Frank,” a one-act “music-drama” by Enid Futterman and Michael Cohen, based on Frank’s famous diaries. It’s a stripped-down play: the set is little more than a simple wooden chair and a small platform stage, on which sits a slab table and bench, against the backdrop of a wall covered with handwritten script. There are just two performers, both Nautilus favorites:  Vanessa Gamble plays “Anne” with remarkable subtlety, emotional nuance and wit; Joel Liestman (familiar from last year’s “The View from Here”) provides an occasional male foil for our heroine, as well as periodic narration.

I read a version of Anne Frank’s published diaries in junior high and haven’t revisited them since; I wonder how many of us encountered her first (only) as schoolkids? The basic outlines of her story are well-known to most of us: the Frank family along with their friends, the Van Pels and, later, Fritz Pfeffer, squirreled themselves away in a secret suite of rooms above her father’s offices in Amsterdam, not venturing from their hiding place for two years in an attempt to escape capture by the Nazis.

Vanessa Gamble as “Anne” with Joel Liestman. Photo courtesy of Nautilus Music-Theater.

When I read Frank’s diaries as a teenager, I understood the gist of the story, but the contours of its horrors were, honestly, beyond my ken. I was struck most by the romance of the “secret annex” hidden behind a bookcase, her flirtation with Peter Van Pels, an against-the-odds sense of adventure. I knew there was no happy ending, that the villains got her and her family in the end; what’s more, I remember feeling unsettled by the sense of wrongness of that fact. But the ruthless efficiency of genocide, the sheer inhumanity of the situation, the desperation and incredulity that must have accompanied the upending of all that was normal and civilized in their lives? Those remained stubbornly unfathomable to me.

Nautilus’s  production shades this beloved, familiar character, giving Anne Frank a richness and depth of personality that filled some of the gaps in my earlier, less nuanced recollections of her. In this production, Anne doesn’t fit an easy type; she’s more than a typically star-struck, sweetly precocious innocent ensnared by history, and more than a proxy for the war’s larger category of victims. During the post-show Q&A with the audience, Liestman remarked, “So often, we read her diaries and imagine some sanctified Anne, a saint floating around in the annex, rather than a flesh-and-blood girl.”

Futterman’s libretto for “I Am Anne Frank” acquaints us anew with the girl we think we know: this Anne is bawdy and sexually curious; she’s by turns charming and prickly and has a streak of real cussedness; she’s endowed with a wry wit and sharp tongue and an ebullient theatricality. The vividness with which her character is drawn, and the sensitivity with which Gamble plays her, makes the danger she faces feel more terrible; the darkness outside doesn’t feel like a grand adventure at all, but  rather like an intrusion, jarring and ineffable and alien.

With the support of a grant from the state’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, Nautilus has toured the production around Minnesota for the past couple of years, bringing the play to a number of smaller cities and rural theaters. While the Twin Cities’s brief run for “I Am  Anne Frank” has already come and gone, you can catch Vanessa Gamble in “Kingdom Undone”

at the Southern Theater this March, where she’ll play Mary Magdalene. Joel Liestman will be on stage with “The Broadway Songbook: Words and Music of Stephen Sondheim,” opening this weekend at the Ordway.

For more information on present and future productions visit the theater company’s website: nautilusmusictheater.org.