[Note: Throughout this week, three cast members of "The Diary of Anne Frank" will give us a backstage look at the making of Uni's fall play. Senior Michelle Gao begins the diary today. Contributing later this week will be junior Lauren Piester and sophomore Anna Gooler.]

DRIVING TO UNI on Sunday for the first tech rehearsal of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” I felt a sense of excitement. Everything feels different when stage lights are shining in your face, and you can barely see past them into the darkness of the audience.

During tech week, everything pulls together. Everything needs to pull together, or the show fails. “Four more rehearsals, Michelle,” Lauren Piester said to me as we walked to the south door. “And then it’s for real.”

I couldn’t help but feel a little curl of nervousness in my stomach as she said those words. They rang with foreboding.

I realize that my words are repetitive. If you read my “Anything Goes” diary from last spring, you will see that I was panicking then, too. But there are different worries for each show.

For “Anything Goes,” the terror was more related to dance numbers and missing cues. In “Anne Frank,” I have my cues down. I know when and how to enter and exit.

But there are certain lines in this show that I always fumble, no matter how easily I can say them offstage. There are props that I need to bring onstage that are mentioned in the dialogue; if I happened to forget a prop one night, certain lines wouldn’t make sense.

The trick, I’ve found, is to focus on the positive things. With each rehearsal, people have gotten a better grasp on how their characters think. We are slowly learning exactly what to do each night in the empty spaces where we don’t have lines.

The sense of community built by long rehearsals and sleep deprivation grows stronger and stronger as the days pass, and it fuels everyone to do as well as they possibly can.

Monday night was the first 5 to 10 p.m. rehearsal. After getting dinner from Za’s with Jamie Weiser, Hannah Lake-Rayburn, Lor Sligar, and Lauren Piester, we went back to Uni and ran through notes that our director, Barbara Ridenour, had taken on Sunday while watching the show. Then, we ran the last scene approximately seven times, trying to get sound and light cues exactly right.

Everything is still a little rough, and I am starting to feel a little uneasy. At the end of the night, we still hadn’t been able to run through the show once in its entirety — unheard of.

We did take time to run the last scene at the beginning, but it’s still rather disconcerting to not know how an actual show feels like.

Two more rehearsals. Tonight and then Halloween night. The subject matter of “The Diary of Anne Frank” is wearing me down a little bit, since I go through it night after night.

But combining with that is an extreme desire for everything to go smoothly, to be able to truly affect our audiences by turning ourselves into our characters.

And it’s tough. All of us in the cast and crew like to laugh. If anything funny happens at rehearsal, we all jump on it because it lightens the mood.

But at this point, we’re all going to have to buckle down and get serious. We have a good show — Jamie Weiser, who’s doing sound, said, “Sometimes I have a hard time looking at my script for sound cues, because I want to watch so much” — but we still have a ways to go.

But in the immortal words of Bob the Builder: “Can we fix it? YES WE CAN!”

CAST LIST: "THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK"

• Anne Frank: Sarah Lake-Rayburn
• Otto Frank: Ethan Berl
• Edith Frank: Lor Sligar
• Margot Frank: Lauren Piester
• Miep Gies: Michelle Gao
• Peter Van Daan: Dillon Price
• Mr. Kraler: Rob Diehl
• Mrs. Van Daan: Hannah Lake-Rayburn
• Mr. Van Daan: Ethan Stone
• Mr. Dussel: Zach Goldberg
• Soldiers: Will Erickson, Anna Gooler, Daniel McNamara, Tianna Pittenger, Laura Voitik
• Understudies: Will Erickson, Anna Gooler, Katayun Salehi, Tianna Pittenger, Laura Voitik

The view from backstage as the cast gets ready to rehearse. Gargoyle photo by Michelle Gao (click to enlarge)