Anne Frank (25 page)

And finally there is the line that has come in for so much criticism for its role in distorting our view of Anne and of her diary. “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart!” It appears not just once but twice in the play. We hear it when Anne tells Peter that the world is “going through a phase, the way I was with Mother. It’ll pass, maybe not for hundreds of years, but some day…I still believe, in spite of everything…” And it is repeated in the final scene, when Otto has returned to the deserted annex. After paging through the diary for the inspirational sentiment, which Anne intones in a voice-over, Otto adds, “She puts me to shame.” In one especially vituperative letter to Otto, Meyer Levin called that the only accurate line in the drama.

Even as the principals involved in the Broadway production battled over Anne’s Jewishness, even as Meyer Levin claimed to speak for her as a fellow writer, there was no one to fight for an accurate representation of Anne’s brilliance and her gifts as an artist. But why would anyone, really? She was only a girl who kept a diary for the last two years of her life.

N
ONE
of this seemed to bother the critics who helped make the play an instant success. In the
New York Times,
Brooks Atkinson wrote that “they have made a lovely, tender drama out of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’…they have treated it with admiration and respect…Out of the truth of a human being has come a delicate, rueful, moving drama.”

Ten days later, again in the
New York Times
, Atkinson rethought—and heightened—the praise he’d already given the play. “There is only one way to account for the soft radiance
of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ The play and the performance are inspired. At rare intervals along Broadway, something happens that puts the theater on its mettle and animates everyone into doing a little more than he is capable of doing. A dream of impossible perfection drives everyone into lifting himself up by his bootstraps. Something in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ has had that happy effect.”

Newsweek
’s summary lauded “the punch of plain, poignant truth.” A positive but peculiar notice in the
New Yorker
contained the following passage: “I can think of no criticism of anything the authors have done, except possibly a tendency toward the end to make their adolescent heroine just a shade more consciously literary and firmly inspirational than either her age or her indicated character would appear to warrant. I have not read the book, however, and it may well be that the quotations that bothered me were taken from it verbatim, since, as I am well aware, most young ladies have their flowery moments. The fault, in any case, is slight, and I think the play on the whole is magnificent.”

Only a few critics would remark on what had been lost in the course of Anne’s coronation as a Broadway princess. Writing in
Commentary,
Algene Ballif noted that, “If the diary of Anne Frank is remarkable for any one thing, it is for the way in which she is able to command our deepest seriousness about everything she is going through—the way she makes us forget she is an adolescent and makes us wish that this way of experiencing life were not so soon lost by some of us, and much sooner found by most of us. Ironically for her, the Anne Frank on Broadway cannot command our seriousness, for all Anne’s true seriousness—her honesty, intelligence, and inner strength—has been left out of the script…. If we in America cannot present her with the respect and integrity and seriousness she deserves, then I think we should not try to present her at all. Not all
adolescents, even in America, are the absurd young animals we know from stage and screen…. Anne Frank was not the American adolescent, as Hackett and Goodrich would have us believe. She was an unaffected young girl, uniquely alive, and self-aware—experiencing more, and in a better way perhaps, than most of us do in a lifetime.”

A year after its Broadway debut, the play opened in Germany, where critic Kenneth Tynan observed this response at the end of the performance. “The house lights went up on an audience that sat drained and ashen, some staring straight ahead, others staring at the ground, for a full half-minute. Then as if awakening from a nightmare they rose and filed out in total silence, not looking at each other, avoiding even the customary blinks of recognition with which friend greets friend. There was no applause, and there were no curtain calls.” A rather less wholehearted reaction was recorded by Theodor Adorno, who reported that, after seeing the drama, one German woman said, “Yes, but
that
girl at least should have been allowed to live.”

Sales of the book spiked in Germany and throughout Europe in the wake of the play’s popularity. Perhaps the Anne of the diary was, despite the cuts and edits that had been made for the German edition, still too complicated, too Jewish—and too angry—for the Germans to embrace. But the conciliatory, hopeful, “universal” and dumbed-down Anne made that embrace possible, and Anne quickly became an object of devotion. A memorial plaque now marks the house in Frankfurt where she lived as a small child, and, in 1957, two thousand young Germans made a quasireligious pilgrimage to leave flowers on the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, where Anne is believed to be buried.

Performed in schools, community centers, and summer theaters, the play has acquainted countless audiences with
Anne Frank and her tragic plight, and has helped steer thousands of readers back to the diary; to a lesser extent, this is also true of the Hollywood film based on the drama. Less happily, the play has, for many people,
become
the diary. In classrooms throughout this country and the world, it is taught to students for whom the flighty, mindless stage Anne becomes the
only
Anne Frank.

And yet there is no denying the effect that the play has on its audiences. I remember seeing the original Broadway production, which meant that I had to have been between eight and ten years old. I was already a passionate fan of the diary, which is how I know how young I was when I first read it. I remember watching the play, feeling that Anne’s diary had been brought to life and being so moved that I wept. I remember that the audience was weeping, and that I felt (though I would not have known how to express it then) that a private and personal experience had become a communal one. I could not have been more grateful to have found a theater full of people who shared my admiration and pity for this remarkable girl, and my passion, however childish, for her work.

I
N
1997, Anne Frank returned to Broadway, in a new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman. Approached by producers Amy Nederlander and David Stone and by director James Lapine, Kesselman undertook the commission because, she says, “I wanted to restore the truth” to the way that Anne had been portrayed onstage. By then, the publication of the 1995
Definitive Edition
had brought the diary new attention, and those involved in the project wanted to provide a more nuanced and complete picture of Anne’s character and achievement.

Kesselman’s initial idea was that her version would closely follow Goodrich and Hackett’s, with only the “frame”—the
prologue and epilogue in which Otto revisits the attic—eliminated. But as she reread the diary, she decided that more needed to be done, a decision complicated by the fact that the copyright specified that no more than 10 percent of the original 1955 play could be altered.

In fact, Kesselman’s adaptation is more faithful to the diary than its predecessor. Anne’s voice, her intelligence, and her spirit come through more clearly, and there are longer passages read verbatim from her journal. Anne’s references to her physicality—and to her memory of touching another girl’s breasts—have been restored. This time, we hear the radio speech by Minister Bolkestein that inspired Anne to think that her diary might be published and to hope that she might grow up to become a writer. The historical and religious contexts have been clarified, as has the threat of what being arrested will mean to the annex residents. We listen to the voice of SS leader Rauter ordering that the Netherlands be cleansed of Jews. (The fact that only a small percentage of Dutch Jews survived was, claims Kesselman, a “revelation” that changed, for her, the popularly held notion that the entire Dutch population was either hiding Jews or working for the Resistance.)

The minor characters are more rounded and more persuasive, and Mrs. Van Daan is given a touching speech about how she fell in love with her husband. In an early public reading of Kesselman’s version, Linda Lavin, who played Mrs. Van Daan, was moved to tears the first time she read the passage.

“She doesn’t do that very often,” an agent is said to have dryly commented.

Anne’s belief in the goodness of the human heart has been retained, but returned to what Cynthia Ozick termed its “bed of thorns.” The lines about the world being transformed into a wilderness and the suffering of millions are the last we hear from Anne in the play, which ends with Otto informing the au
dience of how the others perished and how Hanneli saw Anne, naked, her head shaved, ridden with lice, shortly before she died of typhus. Unlike Goodrich-Hackett’s, Kesselman’s adaptation makes it difficult for the audience to remain in doubt about what happened to Anne.

But finally a play is only a script, a blueprint, and much depends on the quality of the production. In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.

Responses to the 1997 Broadway production were more mixed.
New York Times
theater critic Ben Brantley was quite taken by the leading actress: “To see Natalie Portman on the stage of the Music Box Theater is to understand what Proust meant when he spoke of girls in flower. Ms. Portman, a film actress making her Broadway debut, is only sixteen, and despite her precocious resume, she gives off a pure rosebud freshness that can’t be faked. There is ineffable grace in her awkwardness, and her very skin seems to glow with the promise of miraculous transformation.”

Others were less convinced. Writing in
Commentary,
Molly Magid Hoagland noted, “Despite the changes, this is still the sentimental play about a luminous, flirtatious, idealistic Anne Frank that made the critics swoon 40 years ago.” In many cases, the critics’ disappointment focused on Portman, who appears to have taken too literally the stage directions to run and jump, to fling her arms around her father’s neck and prance about. Also in the
New York Times,
Vincent Canby called Portman’s performance “earnestly artificial, having been directed to behave in a fashion that might have embarrassed even Sandra Dee’s Gidget. Ms. Portman seems never to walk if she could skip; when she lies on the floor, tummy down, heels up, writing in her beloved diary, her little feet are forever kicking back
and forth like a 4-year-old girl’s. The girl we see has no relation to the thoughts she speaks, either in person or as prerecorded narration.” And Portman’s own statement, in an interview, that the play “is funny, it’s hopeful, and she’s a happy person” seems to have been at least partly what raised Cynthia Ozick’s psychic temperature to the boiling point at which she wrote “Who Owns Anne Frank?”

For Ozick, Otto Frank is to blame for being “complicit in this shallowly upbeat view,” for emphasizing Anne’s idealism and her spirit and “almost never calling attention to how and why that idealism and spirit were smothered, and unfailingly generalizing the sources of hatred.” To which the reader can only respond by wishing that the sources of hatred were not as generalized as indeed they are. If only the perpetrators and the victims of prejudice were forever limited to Germans and Jews.

Once more, Anne’s diary, and the circumstances surrounding it, have given rise to a paradox. Perhaps Otto Frank was right to doubt the wisdom of dramatizing his daughter’s work. Perhaps he should have listened to his instincts and resisted the lure of money, fame, and—more important from Otto’s point of view—a greatly expanded audience for Anne’s book. And yet that audience was, to some extent, generated by the play and the film. We cannot estimate how many readers the play has created for the diary, how many people would never have sought out the book had they not seen the drama first, how many students would never have heard of the diary had the theatrical versions not brought it wider acclaim. In fact, only after the play and the film appeared did the diary begin to be widely adopted as a classroom text.

Though not everyone would agree, one could argue that, in this case, the end result justified the means. Regardless of how the play and the film distorted Anne Frank into a bubble
headed messenger of redemption, regardless of how she was stripped of her religion and ethnicity, robbed of her genius, removed from history and recast as a ditsy teen, the play and the film steered millions of readers back to the diary, which would always remain the diary, no matter how it was misrepresented. As Molly Magid Hoagland wisely pointed out, “There is no need to rely on Broadway, or any intermediary, for a true sense of the brilliant bundle of contradictions that was Anne Frank. Anyone who has a mind to can still turn to the work that Miep Gies rescued and that Otto Frank, despite misgivings, and to his everlasting credit, brought into the light of day. In its pages, in whatever edition, his daughter has always spoken for herself.”

Two years after the play’s Broadway run, Natalie Portman wrote, in
Time
magazine, about the difference those two years had made in her reading of the diary, a change that one can’t help wishing had occurred
before
she took on the role. “At 16, when I portrayed Anne on Broadway, it was her flaws—vanity, overexcitability, and quickness to fight—that interested me the most. And now, upon my most recent perusal just weeks before my 18th birthday, I am struck most strongly by her introspection, solitude, perfect self-awareness and sense of purpose…The beauty and truth of her words have transcended the limits placed upon her life by the darkness of human nature.”