A New Page in Anne Frank's Diary

Mandy Patinkin and a marionette in Compulsion.

Here's a piece I did about Rinne Groff, whose new play Compulsion, is now running Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. The cast includes Mandy Patinkin and an Anne Frank marionette:

Rinne Groff can't remember a time when she didn't know Anne Frank. The daughter of a mother who was both Dutch and Jewish, she's had copies of The Diary of Anne Frank from the time she was a child. Talking by phone about the Public Theater's production of Compulsion, her play about an actual writer obsessed with adapting Anne's diary for the stage, Groff, whose first name is pronounced "Rinna," casts her eyes to a bookshelf stocked with different editions of the source material. Some were part of her collection even before the Amsterdam teen who hid from the Nazis for two years became part of Groff’s professional life.

"I can see a paperback that is very old that was mine, a new version of the diary that just says 'the definitive edition,' which was something my mom gave to me because she wanted to share it with me," says Groff, 41, herself the mother of two young girls. "And a few years ago something came out called 'the revised critical edition' that I bought when I was already working on this project."

Sharing space on that shelf is a rare copy of Meyer Levin's stage adaptation, which Groff's husband purchased for her on eBay for about $50. That script, which Levin boldly self-published after his play was presented in Israel in 1966, despite not having the legal rights to Anne's story, continued to haunt him until his death in 1981 at age 75. He railed against the official Pulitzer Prize-winning stage version for not authentically capturing Anne's voice and sought to win recognition for his, alienating colleagues and friends in the process.

Levin felt he was the ideal candidate to adapt Anne's diary for the stage, since he helped to get it published in the U.S. But he was passed over by producer and Group Theatre cofounder Cheryl Crawford in favor of Hollywood screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, whom Levin felt downplayed Jewish elements of the story. His destructive obsession stirred Groff's passions 16 years ago when she read a review of a nonfiction book about Levin and Anne Frank.

"Anne Frank was definitely the hook, but it struck other chords with me," says Groff, whose previous Public Theater production, The Ruby Sunrise, dealt with how to tell the story of a would-be television pioneer. "It brushes up against so much great American theater history, it's also a backstage saga about a writer trying to get something on. Then there are larger cultural issues that are raised as to who has the right to control something and how are those rights exercised, and if there are differences morally, it opens up the notion of what should be in the public domain."

Yet even though Compulsion is a true story, Groff wasn't entirely comfortable depicting real-life characters, so in her play Levin (played by Mandy Patinkin) is called Sid Silver, the nom de plume he gave himself in his historical fiction novel, also called Compulsion, about the Leopold and Loeb trial. Another dramatic element Groff culled from Levin's life was his work with marionettes, which drop in and out of the action. Well before Anne Frank became part of his life, Levin designed marionettes and ran a puppet theater in Chicago, staging productions that included O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. Groff's Compulsion opens with a marionette Anne writing in her diary.

That device also gives rise to the image of Levin as puppeteer, desperate to have a hand in controlling Anne and her story. Compulsion questions whether his motives are selfless (to give a voice to all the Jews who died in the Holocaust) or selfish (to attach his name to the work of a writer destined to endure the ages). Silver’s conviction to his vision is as admirable as his abrasiveness and tunnel vision are off-putting, but in spite of everything Groff believes he was good at heart, a man fighting forces that wanted to "de-Judaize" Anne.

"I have great sympathy for Sid Silver, I have great love for Sid Silver," she says tenderly. "His way of being in the world is a flawed way of being, but it's also very earnest. He stops being able to see accurately because he is so interested in not having his vision perverted. I always like to emphasize is that he is buoyed by love. And it's a romantic love in a way. He fell in love and would do anything, go to the ends of the earth, because of that love."

A Tale of Two Plays

Sue Cremin and Edoardo Ballerini in Honey Brown Eyes.

With America's political attention aimed at ourselves these days, and what little energy we have to focus on international affairs devoted to conflicts in the Middle East, Honey Brown Eyes' subject — the Bosnian War — seems like it happened a century ago. (I know it happened in the 20th century, but you get my drift.)

Promising playwright Stefanie Zadravec shows the effects of the war on two former friends who were members of a rock band and now are on opposing sides of the conflict. Not only do they end up in different cities, but they also appear to be stranded in different plays in the Working Theater production that I saw for Time Out New York. The first act plays like an over-the-top melodrama, the second, an understated character study.

The Younger Brother Also Rises

Pablo Schreiber in Gruesome Playground Injuries.

The first time I saw Pablo Schreiber act was either in the TV crime drama The Wire or the Off-Broadway play Sin: A Cardinal Deposed. Both were around five or six years ago, and the order escapes me. In Sin he sat silently onstage for nearly the entire 90-minute show before delivering a stirring closing monologue about the sexual molestation he suffered at the hands of a priest when he was a boy. In The Wire, still the show for which he's best known, he played, to quote my friend Joshua, "the less-stupid guy from season two."

I knew back then that he was Liev Schreiber's younger brother, but he's become such a successful actor in his own right that it's easy to forget. Now he's back on TV in another cable series, FX's critically acclaimed but low-rated Lights Out and appearing in another Off-Broadway show, Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries. When I interviewed him for Time Out New York he told me that for him to ever work with brother Liev, it would have to be a project with two great roles for actors that are 10 years apart, like True West. I think they should they just hold out for the next Waiting for Godot revival.

Doused and Deconstructed

Rouner and Ryan in Tom Ryan Thinks He's James Mason...

How I am growing to embrace weird downtown experimental theater. I quite liked Tom Ryan Thinks He's James Mason Starring in a Movie By Nicholas Ray in which a Man’s Illness Provides an Escape from the Pain, Pressure and Loneliness of Trying to be the Ultimate American Father, Only to Drive Him Further Into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Addict and Misunderstood Visionary -- whew! -- which has a milk-drenching scene (above) that brought back memories of the tomato-juice-dousing scene in Elizabeth Marvel's Hedda Gabler. Not only are these great ways to illustrate power struggles, but they're also lots of fun to watch.

The back of the one-page program thanks a list of folks for providing financial support to the production, from director Daniel Fish and starring Thomas Jay Ryan and Christina Rouner. I was heartened to see so many theater artists contributing to the development of weird experimental theater. Among the names: Michael Cerveris, Kathleen Chalfant, Jesse Berger, Colleen Werthmann, David Zinn, Linus Roache, Moises Kaufman, David Herskovits, Emily Mann, Henry Stram, to name a few.

Plays With Plenty of Passion

Dominic Fumusa in Passion Play.

So many theater folks have bemoaned the lack of new hits on Broadway this fall that I wonder if anyone's noticed all the fabulous new plays that were part of the Off-Broadway landscape, usually for runs that were far too short.

TheaterMania's list of the 10 best shows of '10 includes six Off-Broadway shows. Besides Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play, the entry that I contributed, two of my other faves, New York Theatre Workshop's hypnotic The Little Foxes and Simon McBurney's soul-stirring A Disappearing Number, also made the cut.

If I could have picked all 10 myself, I also would have included Middletown, Clybourne Park, A Bright New Boise and In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards.

In general I'm not a fan of year-end best and worst lists (I'd rather just focus on what I can look forward to next year), but a couple of others that I enjoyed are the picks from Time Out New York's three staffers, which demonstrate a diversity of stage offerings, and the often maligned Charles Isherwood's list in New York Times, also a celebration of bright, new and largely Off-Broadway plays.

Sparkling Venice: "Like a Wild Animal"

Lily Rabe and David Harbour in Merchant.

The first time I saw David Harbour on stage I couldn't help noticing that he's incredibly beautiful. It didn't take long to realize he's also very talented and smart (a Dartmouth grad, to boot). The production of Virginia Woolf he did with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner on Broadway remains vividly etched in my mind even though I saw it more than five years ago, as does that episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent in which he played a religious nut who kills his family.

So I was happy to see that he was one of the new cast members joining the Broadway transfer of The Merchant of Venice, replacing Hamish Linklater as Bassanio, and was glad to have the chance to talk to him about his role. My favorite quote of his is about working with Al Pacino: "He is like a wild animal, sort of like a dog that you don't actually know how to train. But I love that because that's when something inspired actually happens."

The show's even stronger than it was in Central Park this summer (or perhaps I was just better able to focus since I wasn't melting in 95 percent humidity). Either way I found Harbour's performance quite thrilling. In Bassanio's first scene with Antonio, the one where Bassanio convinces him to borrow money for him, Harbour touches the back of Byron Jennings' neck in a way that's both intimate and manipulative, and it demonstrates the power Bassanio has over his friend. A really interesting choice.

Pee-wee at the North Pole?

Pee-wee and Globey in The Pee-wee Herman Show.

Anyone who's caught Pee-wee Herman's Broadway show and isn't a polar bear or a penguin might have noticed that the theater was freeeeeezing! Even though I saw it on a moderate November afternoon, I kept my coat on the entire time. Well, according to an insider (and when I used this term it means I heard it second- or third-hand), Paul Reubens wants the theater to be that cold so that his Pee-wee makeup doesn't run.

And here I thought he was just eternally youthful!

Pee-wee's big Broadway debut is one of several shows that I recently reviewed for Cititour. Here's a rundown of some highlights and lowlights, in descending order:

The Pee-wee Herman Show

The Pitmen Painters

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Lombardi

Overall, though, I can't complain. I've seen some fantastic stuff this year, even just this week. In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards was a knockout, as was the National Theatre's Hamlet, with the terrific Rory Kinnear, which I watched with critics and audiences at Cinema 1 2 3 Thursday night, and tonight I begin my three-part journey to The Great Game: Afghanistan.