Compulsion (review)

Through publication of her diary, Anne Frank became the unwitting spokesperson for a generation of Jewish voices silenced during the Holocaust. Meyer Levin, author of the novel Compulsion (1956), a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder, was drawn to the power of her narrative. As a journalist covering the liberation of the concentration camps in Eastern Europe, he grappled head-on with the limitations of a writer's ability to convey the enormity of this horror. He reasoned in his autobiography that someday a teller would arise from among the Jews to depict the Nazi genocide—in essence predicting the power of Anne Frank's voice. When Doubleday published Frank's diary in 1952, Levin already had been its advocate for several years, supposedly asking her father, Otto Frank, for the rights to produce the stage version, and receiving them. The ensuing wrangle between them for control over Anne Frank's voice resulted in years of legal battles and calumny, chiefly incited by Levin's own commitment to Zionism and Jewish causes and his desire to be immortalized as a writer. Rinne Groff's drama Compulsion, originally commissioned jointly by the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep, charts how far one writer's well-meaning advocacy can go awry. Using stringed marionettes to represent the various constituencies that manipulated Frank's story, this play epitomizes how staging the life of a historical figure inevitably becomes a complex political process.

Borrowing Meyer Levin's alternate identity, Sid Silver, for the name of her protagonist, Groff telescopes his lifelong quest into a series of episodes that take place in New York and Israel, the overhead projections on an otherwise blank stage indicating place and time. Act 1 ends with his wife, Tereska Torres (Hannah Cabell), threatening to commit suicide unless Silver accepts Otto Frank's settlement to relinquish his rights to the play for $50,000; act 2 opens in Israel, with Silver plotting to produce his play against court orders. The traditional conflict-driven structure of Groff's work reveals—in documentary-style—the endless debates that Silver had with publishers, lawyers, producers, and theatre directors as he struggled for permission for permission to produce his written version of the diary. Drawing from legal documents, letters, newspapers articles, and Lawrence Graver's 1995 biography of Levin, Groff traces the spirited Silver through his initial meetings with Doubleday's agents in 1951 to his death in 1981, complete with an imaginary afterworld encounter with Anne Frank.

Mandy Patinkin and Stephen Barker Turner in Compulsion. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

At the center of the play lies the strong-willed personality of Sid Silver, who feeds upon his communal sense of Jewish persecution and anger. Performing the brash Silver, Mandy Patinkin drove his character through one emotional crisis after another; every scene revealed Silver cajoling, placating, or apologizing, desperately augmenting the layers of his argument until he erupted, signaling a megalomaniacal personality that belied his seemingly disinterested championing of Anne Frank. While Silver initially appears as a chump bullied by New York publishers and Broadway producers, his underhanded methods—from slandering Carson McCullers to castigating Otto Frank—of obtaining the rights to Frank's diary reveal instead a tormented fiend.

Hannah Cabell in Compulsion. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

Groff works judiciously to convey an even-handed portrait of this tormented, would-be writer. She validates Silver's complaints against the established adaptation of Frank's diary by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who did remove Jewish references to make the play more appealing to non-Jewish audiences. Furthermore, Silver's version, when it is finally staged illegally at the Israel Soldiers Theater in Tel Aviv, garners praise from reviewers as a more exact transmission of Frank's words. But he cannot enjoy these accolades; by casting the Broadway producers' battle against him as a form of anti-Semitic persecution, his own sense...