Anne Frank Lives On In "Compulsion"
Compulsion
Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
New York, N.Y.
The diary of Jewish Dutch teenager Anne Frank, a mesmerizing chronicle of her two years in hiding in Amsterdam during World War II, found after the Nazis sent her and her family to a concentration camp, has captivated the world for more than fifty years. It is back again as the centerpiece of Compulsion, by Rinne Groff, the behind the scenes story of the anguish of writer Meyer Levin in trying to obtain the right to author the play based on the diary.
Levin, named Sid Silver here, is the author of the best selling book Compulsion, about Chicago murderers Leopold and Loeb. That book was turned into a play and movie that is shown frequently on television.
The shining star of Compulsion, a history play at the Public Theater that sheds much light on the sad diary, World War II and the Holocaust, is Mandy Patinkin. He is marvelous as the tough, fast-talking, crass, authoritarian, obsessed Silver, a cranky man who could annoy anyone. Patinkin, waving his arms in the air, strutting about the stage and erupting about everybody and everything, is a torrent of jealousy, venom and anger. He gives a mercurial performance.
The play sometimes needs him. Compulsion sails along, Patinkin at the helm, through a dramatic and tense first act, but slows down in the second. Following defeats in America, Silver and his young French wife moved to Israel, where he got an army theater company to finally stage his play. The second act is sometimes tedious, except for a sparkling finale. A good twenty minutes could be cut out of the second act.
The problem with Compulsion is that it tries too hard to stick to the story. The result is a staid retelling of the tale, sometimes without much passion. The dynamic Patinkin saves the play and turns it into a pretty good history drama, though. People should see Compulsion not only to learn more about the history of Anne Frank, but to see a masterful performance by Patinkin.
One of the most fascinating sidelights of the play is a bevy of nearly life-sized marionette puppets, all designed by Silver (Meyer Levin carved puppets for a marionette theater he ran prior to his writing career). A very life-like Anne Frank puppet appears on stage from time to time, flying up and down from the top of the theater (thankfully, there are no Spider-Man malfunctions here). Anne the puppet is haunting and a welcome addition to the play.
It is Patinkin who soars, though. The veteran stage and screen star gives a tour de force performance as the always angry, always embroiled Sid Silver. Everybody who disagrees with him is a communist. He is always right and everybody else is always wrong. He yells and screams and at one point insists that if he writes the Frank play he will live forever, as she has. He sneers that the pair of writers selected to write The Diary of Anne Frank are hacks. They were Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who wrote the screenplay to It’s A Wonderful Life. He verbally batters his wife and friends and his marriage is threatened.
You either believe Silver’s story that he was a victim of many villains (“they are a lynch mob out to get me”), you think that he brought about his own demise, or you shrug and say the answer was a little bit of both. The real Meyer Levin, who was awarded a small amount of money in a lawsuit, held a grudge about the diary and the play all of his life, writing a book about his battles.
There is a lot of history about Anne Frank and the Holocaust in the play. She is introduced as the puppet early on and then, in a sad tableaux, the entire back of the stage is filled with a color photo of her home in Amsterdam. Patinkin reads from the diary again and again, three times reading her haunting line that “in the end I think people are good at heart.” The readings are riveting.
Theatergoers find out much about Anne, just fourteen when she went into hiding, the Nazis, the war, and the death of six million Jews. Through the ranting of Silver, the audience finds out much about the persecution of Jews after the war, in both America and Israel.
The diary of Anne Frank is heartbreaking. I read through much of it again just before I saw Compulsion. She is a girl becoming a woman, hidden from the world in a tiny apartment that she shares with her parents, sister and another family. She wrote when she first arrived that “the fact that we can never go outside bothers me more than I can say, and then I’m really afraid that we’ll be discovered and shot, not a very nice prospect.”
The strength of the diary, though, is that it is the very real story of a group of people herded together for years. Anne chronicles her own feelings as she grows up, notes the squabbles of her parents, the prejudice she feels by the others against her, jealousies with her co-residents, her discovery of boys, the disputes over clothing and supplies, the way dinner is cooked and good and bad weather. There are wonderful scenes, like the time she looks out the window late at night to watch the allied air force battle the Germans in the skies over Amsterdam. There are awful scenes and the sounds of “guns kept banging away all the time.”
She wrote constantly about the innocent Jews shot in the streets by the Germans. She said that if someone who set off an explosion isn’t found, “then about five prominent citizens, who had absolutely nothing to do with it, are shot dead. It is really awful.”
There are shattered dreams, too. In an entry on July 21, 1944, Anne wrote that “I am getting really hopeful now that things are going well.” Two weeks later Germans, acting on a tip, broke into Anne’s apartment and arrested everyone. She died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.
The play brings Anne’s tragic story to life again. Although the play has some problems, it is a fine historical tribute to the doomed girl and everyone who perished at the hands of the Nazis in World War II.
The acting in the play is quite good. Hannah Cabell is wonderful as both Ms. Mermin, an editor at Doubleday and Co., and Silver’s French wife. Matte Osian also plays several roles well, including a lawyer whom Silver calls a “Nazi” and sends a marionette of him with a knife in its back. The skilled puppeteers are Emily DeCola, Dan Fay and Eric Wright. The play is nicely directed by Oskar Eustis.
Even though it needs to be trimmed, Compulsion is a good play about the diary of a wonderful little girl. As you leave the theater, you do not think of the tragedy of her death, but the tragedy that she, and all the others murdered by the Nazis, never had the chance to enjoy the long lives God planned for them, and that we all lost the chance to know them.
PRODUCTION: The play is produced by the Public Theater, the Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Yale Repertory Theater. Set: Eugene Lee, Costumes: Susan Hilferty, Lighting: Michael Chybowski, Puppets: Matt Acheson.