Ghost Puppeteer – Tablet Magazine

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Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion. (Joan Marcus)

Who is the audience for Rinne Groff’s play? Compulsion, a meta-theatrical interpretation of Anne Frank’s diary?

At first I thought the play, which starred Mandy Patinkin and in which Anne Frank was played by a puppet, was aimed at my demographic – baby boomers – or older, Philip Roth readers The Ghost Writer, worried about the Holocaust, worried about identity, seeing anti-Semitism. I thought it was introduced to people (like me) who had nightmares about the newspaper when they were kids.

In fact, I was probably the youngest person in the audience the day I saw Compulsion at the Public Theater in Manhattan. (The play has already had success at the Yale Repertory Theater and the Berkeley Repertory Theater.)

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Compulsion is also looking for a younger audience, an audience less stuck in a particular way of thinking about these subjects. Groff, who is one of the founders of Elevator Repair Service, the theater collective best known for Gatz, a captivating reading and staging of seven hours of Gatsby the magnificent, seems at first glance not very interested in the story of Anne Frank told by the newspaper, that of a young writer entering adulthood in the shadow of the Shoah. She is also not interested in the history of The Ghost Writer, in which Roth’s alter ego, Zuckerman, imagines that a woman he meets at his mentor’s house is Anne Frank.

In Compulsion, Anne Frank is a puppet precisely because she is no longer and can never be a girl, because she is an artefact and a symbol. She is more a cloud than a character.

Groff’s real interest seems to be how the newspaper destroyed the very man responsible for its success. In Compulsion, this man is Sid Silver, a slightly fictionalized version of Meyer Levin (Patinkin), the Chicago writer and puppeteer who brought the newspaper to America, became obsessed with making a dramatic version of it – from to be the puppeteer of the newspaper, so to speak – and descended into paranoia and madness.

Stylistically, however, Compulsion is of our time. He owes a lot to reflective works like Being John Malkovich and toI am my own wife, Doug Wright’s one-man show about his conversations with a German transvestite. It’s deep, choppy and unresolved – as theater people like to say, it’s up to the audience to make sense of it.

In real life, the thrilling saga of Levin and the diary was, as Francine Prose wrote in Anne Frank: the book, the life, the afterlife, “so plagued with betrayal and bad behavior…that at least four books have attempted to explain what happened and why.” Years ago, Groff read a review of the most unbiased of these books, Lawrence Graver’s. An obsession for Anne Frank-in the New York Times book review and started researching the story.

It’s easy to see why. In her book, Prose quotes Cynthia Ozick as comparing Levin’s saga to that of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the trial in dark house whose ruinous costs far exceed those of money.

Levin, a writer with tormented relations with his own Jewishness, receives a French version of his young wife’s diary after World War II. He becomes determined to get the newspaper a wider audience. He begins to correspond with Otto Frank, he brings the newspaper to Doubleday, he tries to help him sell it. He’s not exactly an agent – he never accepts money for his efforts – but he gives the book a glowing review in the New York Times book review. (Prose points out that his review made for a book that might otherwise have been considered a bestseller.)

After it becomes clear that the newspaper is commercially owned, Doubleday grows increasingly cold at Levin’s suggestion to write the theatrical adaptation, especially since he has no formal contract. Levin becomes more belligerent and lawsuits ensue. Levin sees conspiracies, Cold War ones and anti-Semitic ones. He accuses Doubleday of commercializing the newspaper, of making it less Jewish, of watering it down. He smears the writers Doubleday loves.

None of this helped Levin’s cause. After Doubleday was turned down by numerous writers (including Carson McCullers and Lillian Hellman), two Hollywood hacks made the theatrical adaptation. As some critics pointed out at the time, one of the sins of this adaptation, which ran for 717 Broadway performances, was to replace the wise and conniving voice of Anne Frank with that of a sock-hopper at the brain. The producer wanted the play to make people laugh. For its uplifting ending, the play twists a line from the newspaper, “I always believe people have really good hearts” into banality. (Groff also uses this line, for ironic effect.)

Levin made his own dark, serious, possibly unplayable adaptation. He moved to Israel.

It’s a good story. And Compulsion, which is also the title of a book by Levin on Leopold and Loeb, asks some good questions, some of which have already been asked: Was Levin mad or was he wronged? Who owns an artwork about the Holocaust? What is the cost of turning such a work into a classic? What is the cost to take advantage of it? Who should tell the stories of the Jews? Can others do it?

Still, my first response to this piece was frustration. There is an unresolved tension between Groff’s interest in dreams, questions, meta-theatre, and realistic acting. Patinkin, for example, plays Silver with cheerful, old-fashioned belligerence. From the moment he falters on stage (greeted by a standing ovation), he is too Jewish. “I’m writing a book about what it means to be Jewish in today’s world,” he told the horrified Doubleday editors. He could have come out of an Arthur Miller play.

A thornier and more intractable problem is that of the limits of theatre, where it is difficult to layer complex historical facts and arguments. So you can’t know for example, when Silver rants that a Stalinist plot is responsible for the refusal of adaptation, that it’s nonsense. In fact, the only thing he was right about was that Doubleday wanted to make money off of Anne Frank.

But Groff gains something by showing scenes inside Silver’s wedding. In one, which takes place on Fire Island, Silver works on the theatrical adaptation without a contract. His long-suffering wife confronts him. You learn that while they were dating – he was a 40-year-old soldier, and she was 19 – he pursued her with all the greed with which he pursues Anne Frank today. They dance.

There are also some satisfying confrontational moments, like when Silver spits in the face of one of the editors. And the schticky ones, like when Silver says, “I still like juice,” a Borscht Belt joke about “I like Jews.” It made me laugh.

The moment that redeemed Compulsion is for me one of the least naturalistic in the piece. It happens in the third act. It’s 1966 and the Silvers have fled to Israel to escape Anne Frank. But they can’t. Silver is sleeping but he, his wife and Anne Frank are all in bed together. Silver speaks lines of Anne Frank, which increases the sense of confusion as to who is really who here. Silver’s wife tries to convince Anne to leave the family alone. (She once tried to kill herself because of her husband’s obsession with Anne.) Anne will only do so if his wife lets her sleep in the bed. Eventually, she relents and they huddle together.

Just then, Patinkin gets out of bed and, into the spotlight, sings a haunting song, which I was later told was “Mayn Shtetle Belz.”

Here I thought Compulsion alludes to what it could be about: the search for the invisible lost world. It’s not just historical research, it’s a question of identity. “Mayn Shtetele Belz” depicts a tiny fragment of that, of unnamed towns and dead Jews, which Silver is tricked into taking over by Anne Frank. But his search is not only about his own identity; it’s about this huge world whose energy remains even though most of the evidence of its existence has disappeared. The diary was one such piece of evidence, and her search for it – and the examination of her relationship to it – drove Silver into madness.

Rachel Shteir, a professor at the DePaul University Theater School, is the author of three books, including, most recently, Theft: A Cultural History of Shoplifting. She is working on a biography of Betty Friedan for Yale Jewish Lives.

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