The Censorship of Sister Mary Ignatius

Unforseen by playwright Christopher Durang, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You turned out to be a firestorm of a play. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights made it a mission to prevent productions of the play as often as possible. What Durang intend as a Catholic’s critical look at church doctrine and methods of transmission they have called “the most notoriously anti-Catholic play ever written.” In his epilogue to the script Durang describes many of the protests his play ignited. Here are some of them.

- Sister Mary opens at Playwrights Horizons in 1981. The Catholic League asks the New York State Arts Council to penalize Playwrights Horizons. When refused Catholic League appeals to the state legislature which supports Playwrights Horizons free speech.

- The Theatre Project in St. Louis announces a 1983 production in a hotel, but the Catholic League persuades the hotel to rescind their space. Two local Universities offer space for the performance. Local Senator Ewin L. Dirick tries to convince the universities or the arts council to cancel the performance. When he fails the national media picks up the story. The show sells out due to the publicity. The next year Dirick proposes a bill to cut the Arts Council budget and to refuse the Theatre Project access to the funds., it dies in committee.

- The Catholic League convinces the Mayor of Boston, Raymond L. Flynn to state the local production at Charles Playhouse is anti-Catholic. The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith releases a similarly condemning statement and protests are rampant during previews. Once the reviews come out saying the lay is not anti-Catholic most of the antagonism dies down.

- The Catholic League stops a production in Detriot through an organized letter-writing campaign.

- In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a small college drama department received petitions with 2,000 signatures each to get them to cancel the show. They did not and the next Board of Directors meeting faced picketers with signs accusing them of bigotry.

- In Erie, Pennsylvania a protest group backed down when they discovered the director was a Polish emigrant who had come to America for Artistic Freedom.

- A theater in Ponca City, Oklahoma canceled its performance after an intense campaign when a local priest met with the director.

- In Coral Gables, Florida a theater company received multiple death threats after doing a production of the play. It was so bad the secretary was warned to not open any packages for the managers in case it was a bomb.

To this day the protests continue. In 2008 the Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus refunded tickets to their students' production of the show after protests.


To read more about the Southeast Missouri State University protest and refunds check out "SEMO offers to refund tickets to controversial play" in the Southeast Missourian at http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992912064198287&ShowArticle_ID=11010806100644367

Christopher Durang

Custom Made ends our 2009-2010 season with Sister Mary Explains It All to You and Actor's Nightmare. These two classic one acts by Christopher Durang well hallmark one of America's most absurd, insightful and hilarious playwrights.

Christopher Durang is an actor and playwright, best known for his satire and dark comedies. His plays often exaggerate human anger, fears and daily agonies to the absurd while still maintaining resonance and recognition. His plays have explored such themes as authoritarianism, isolation, futility, diffidence, failure and loss of ideals all while keeping his audiences laughing.

Durang was born in 1949 in Montclair New Jersey. His mother, Patricia Elizabeth, was a housewife who gave birth to a stillborn child when Durang was three. Desperately wanting a second baby, but unable to have one she flew into a depression. Her husband, Francis Ferdinand Durang, Jr., was an architect with an alcohol problem which intensified with continued failed attempts at further children. Both parents cared for Durang, but the family tension was insurmountable and when Durang was 13 his parents separated.

Patricia Elizabeth was a huge theater fan and took Durang to both local and the nearby New York shows. When her son started writing plays in elementary school she supported his work,. As he grew older she arranged venues for his plays. At Harvard Durang a depression of his own, but came out of it with a new dedication to his work and he got accepted into Yale School of Drama’s exclusive playwrighting M.F.A where he studied with such luminaries as Wendy Wasserstein and Meryl Streep. At Yale Durang’s unique comedic voice was already flourishing in such plays as When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth and The Idiots Karamazov.

In 1976 his first Off-Broadway production was his play Titanic which transferred on a double bill with Das Lusitania Songspeil, a satiric cabaret parodying Brecht and Weill co-authored and performed by Durang and fellow Yale alumnus Sigourney Weaver. The next year A History of the American Film made it to Broadway and Durang was nominated for a Tony award. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, his next play, was presented as a limited run off-off-Broadway to raves and the first of three Obie awards for its author. A year later it was remounted at Playwright’s Horizons with an opening one act called The Actor’s Nightmare. The two quickly moved off-Broadway and played for over two and a half years.

The eighties saw Durang write four of his most enduring plays: Beyond Therapy, Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Laughing Wild. Around the middle of the century Durang began to write for film. He wrote two unproduced screenplays and two produced teleplays which were performed by Jeff Daniels, Carol Burnett and Robin Williams. Durang’s acting career was similarly picking up. He was in the ensemble of his own play The Marriage of Bette and Boo and then stared in Laughing Wild. In the midst of all of this he met and started a relationship with writer John Augustine, the man he has shared his life with for the past twenty-five years. In 1989 he stared in the crackpot mock nightclub act Chris Durang and Dawne. This cabaret of lyrical rock covers and musical songs inappropriately out of context and reinterpreted became a cult hit and continued off and on into the nineties.

Durang continued as an actor and a writer on stage, in television and in film through the nineties. As an actor, his movies included The Butcher’s Wife, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter and The Cowboy Way. On television he had a recurring role on Kristin staring Kristin Chenoweth. None of his three TV pilots took off, but his plays For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and The Marriage of Bette and Boo were both hits. In 1993 he was cast alongside Julie Andrews in Stephen Sondheim’s Putting It Together, continuing a relationship with the composer’s work that had begun when Durang was an eponymous frog in Sondheim’s infamous Yale swimming pool production. In 1994 he and Marsha Norman became co-chairs of Juliard’s Playwrighting Program. To this day they have run the program which has turned out such great contemporary playwrights as David Auburn, David Lindsay-Abaire and Adam Rapp.

Durang’s work continues to challenge and amuse audiences. His recent works include the book and lyrics for the musical Adrift in Mancao, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Miss Witherspoon the latter of which was a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Other awards Durang has received include a Geggenheim, a Rockefeller, the CBS Playwrighting Fellowship and the America Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.

Further Reading:

The best and likely only stop for all questions regarding Durang is his exstensive website: www.christopherdurang.com.

The New York Times online also has archives of their original reviews of most of Christopher Durang's shows, each which give more insight into the playwright: www.nytimes.com.

Actress Julia Belanoff Reflects on Playing Anne Frank

I have cherished every moment as Anne Frank in Custom Made Theatre’s production. Well… maybe not the fighting and crying and Nazi-triumph moments. However, my experience portraying this complex and vivacious young woman has been overwhelmingly positive.

This winter, I had the opportunity to visit Prinsengracht 267 in Amsterdam and see the Secret Annex firsthand. Our guide at the museum took my family into Otto Frank’s old office on the ground floor of the building. While most of the Annex is heavily trafficked by millions of tourists each year, this room is not open to the general public. In fact, its 1943 aroma of dusty old books enveloped me when I entered. I sat at Mr. Frank’s desk, exactly where Anne once wrote in her diary so many years ago. Words cannot describe how meaningful this opportunity was for me. Unlike Anne, I felt so much history and perspective in this old office. When Anne occupied the very same seat, it was only a chair. To me, it was a relic of traumatic times. Anne knew that one day her life could be significant but she couldn’t be sure. She was just a writer with ambition, an empty page, and thoughts to be shared.
Before I perform, I always remember this unlimited potential. I try to step forward as an Anne with dignity and discover new meaning behind her words. For instance: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” Or perhaps: “I feel the suffering of millions.” As a role, Anne Frank is immensely intimidating. She is spunky and insecure, plain and beautiful, superficial and deep; she transforms from a flirty popular girl to an introspective thoughtful young woman. Anne’s story has a tragic well-known end, but within the Annex she never loses hope. She is not a saint: she has flaws. She is a teenager! She fights with her parents and feels misunderstood. Her dreadfully perfect sister Margot irritates her at times. Of course! So much energy and life is trapped within her. Anne is human and alive! She lives on!

In the play, Otto Frank tells Anne about the value of her diary. He says, “When I see you write in [your diary], I know you’ve found your world in there. You’re lucky.” Anne found her world in her diary, but I find my world in Anne. I feel as passionately about acting as she did about writing. I am lucky to have found this world in which I feel so alive. Anne says, “Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is. When I write, I shake off all my cares. But I want to achieve more than that. I want be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met.” I hope I am useful too. I hope to help bring her words to people, and that together we can bring enjoyment to people every night. I am most alive when I can share this story with an audience. I lose myself in her optimism, defiance, and zest for life. I want to let Anne’s spirit flow through me and share her with strangers.

Anne says about a friend in concentration camp, “If only I could take you away and share everything I have with you.” Anne died in Bergen-Belsen. I still wish, more than 65 years later, that I could rescue Anne and share everything I have with her. I think Anne would have been as delightful and engaging as an actress as she was as a writer if she ever got the chance. I try to do what she never had a chance to do, and I share it all with her and the many other young people whose mark on the world was dimmed by the holocaust.

Obsession and Adaptation: Anne Frank on Broadway (and beyond)

We asked dramaturg Paul S. Doyle to take a look at the various adaptations of Anne's diary. In the process he discovered not only how Kesselman's play builds on the work and passion of previous adapters (including Anne herself), but uncovered the fascinating story behind how the diary came to be the world-wide sensation it is today.

When I read first read The Diary of Anne Frank and subsequently read the play (the 1956 Goodrich-Hackett Broadway success, not the 1997 adaptation) and watched the film, I was in late middle school. This would have been right around the same time that Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation was on Broadway, making Ben Brantley of the New York Times swoon over the young Natalie Portman in the role of Anne. I didn’t know that the play had been rewritten at the time, although I wish I had, for the adaptation reincorporates some of Anne’s moments of darker despair and erotic reverie that resonated so strongly with me at the time, when I was nearly the same age Anne was when the Franks went into hiding.

What I did not know at the time, and what I didn’t find out until beginning to do some research for Custom Made on the history of the play and the diary, was the story of how the diary was catapulted from an obscure Holocaust narrative into the international best seller that it remains today, and the collision of avarice, obsession, and genuine desire to find the widest possible audience for Anne’s story that resulted in the original Broadway play.

The story has been explored in several academic books, most recently and most succinctly by Francine Prose, in her 2009 book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, the Afterlife, in which Prose explores the Diary as a consciously-crafted work of literature. In a fascinating chapter, she describes how Anne, during the family’s last few months in the attic worked furiously to revise and edit her diary as a manuscript for possible future publication, fleshing out entries made years before, paring down and rewriting later entries, even coming up with the title Het Achterhuis (The House Behind). In an exhaustively researched critical edition put out by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, it is possible to read, side-by-side-by-side, Anne’s original version of the diary, her edited version, and the version edited by Otto Frank from the previous two (originally published in 1947).

An American war correspondent and author named Meyer Levin was one of the first journalists to enter the concentration camps at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen (where Anne died). Amid the piles of emaciated corpses and bombed-out remnants of the crematoria, Levin vowed that “from amongst themselves, a teller must arise”—a writer whose searing prose would show the world (in particular, America) what the European Jews had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. When his wife gave him a copy of the first published edition of the Diary, Levin wrote immediately to Otto Frank offering to champion the book’s publication—and possible adaptation to stage and screen—in the United States.

Otto agreed, and in 1950, after a mention of the Diary in the New Yorker, Doubleday approached and secured from Otto for the American publishing rights. Otto stipulated that Meyer Levin remain involved as a consultant on the American edition of the Diary. When the American version came out in 1952, Levin wrote a rave review in the New York Times Review of Books—raising all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions, as Levin had been acting as the book’s unofficial agent—which instantly launched the little book to the top of the best-seller lists.

Doubleday, realizing it had a hot property on its hands, began to inquire about selling the dramatic rights to the book. Levin wrote to Otto and asserted that he would be the best choice to write the stage version, and Otto stipulated to Doubleday that any sale of the dramatic rights had to be approved by Levin, who had agreed to withdraw his name from consideration if a famous dramatist agreed to take on the work.

As the book’s popularity grew, more and more famous names began to be discussed to write the play: Carson McCullers, Elia Kazan, Maxwell Anderson. Levin wrote to Otto objecting to each of them in turn, meanwhile working furiously on his own stage adaptation of the book. Cheryl Crawford, a veteran of the Group Theater and a founder of the Actor’s Studio, was hired to produce the play.

Levin’s presence and increasingly desperate letters advancing his desire to write the play grew more and more irritating to the major parties involved. As Cheryl Crawford rejected his script, and Otto Frank’s lawyer determined that Levin had no formal rights to the play, Levin began to write letters to the New York Times, Variety, and to Otto Frank protesting that his play was being suppressed for being “too Jewish.” In 1953, made nervous by Levin’s complaints and threats, Cheryl Crawford withdrew from the project.

Kermit Bloomgarden, the show’s new Broadway producer, advised by Lillian Hellman (who had also become involved in the project), tapped the Hollywood screenwriting team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (It’s a Wonderful Life, Father of the Bride) to write the play. The two immediately began research, talking to rabbis and Jewish community members, visiting the Secret Annex and Otto Frank in Amsterdam. In the meantime, Hellman, Bloomgarden, and the production’s director Garson Kanin advised Goodrich and Hackett to emphasize the humor in the diary. They would eventually write eight drafts of the play.

Levin, meanwhile, took out a paid ad in the New York Post exhorting the public to write to Otto and Bloomgarden and demand a “test reading” of his play before it was “killed.” He wrote to Otto questioning the father’s right to speak for his daughter, claiming that while Otto knew her as a daughter, Levin knew her as a writer, and on the basis of this deeper connection, should be allowed to adapt her diary for the stage. In late 1954, Meyer Levin sued Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank for breach of contract. When the suit was set aside on a technicality, Levin wrote Otto promising to fight the upcoming Broadway production, and comparing this struggle to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In later letters, he compared the choice against his play to the mass murder of the Jews in Europe, and sued again in 1956, this time for plagiarism. He won a settlement of $15,000 from Otto Frank.

In 1973, Meyer Levin published a memoir of his struggle to get his dramatization of the Diary produced, called, appropriately enough, The Obsession. In it, he notes that as the fight to produce his play was going on in America, one of Stalin’s last great anti-Semitic purges was ravaging the Soviet Union. He claims that this influenced Lillian Hellman and other “Stalinists” to conspire to suppress the explicitly Jewish themes in his play, and that it was creeping anti-Semitism, not the pecuniary concerns of turning the Diary into a money-making Broadway hit (that would go on to win the Tony Award, Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize in 1956), that killed his play.

* * *

All this history was forgotten in the glow of the Diary’s international sales and readership and the critical and popular success of the play and film, until Wendy Kesselman published her adaptation of the play in 1997. The return of Anne Frank to the stage sparked two books analyzing the history of the Levin-Frank battles: The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank by Ralph Melnick, and An Obsession with Anne Frank by Lawrence Graver, as well as an article in the New Yorker by Cynthia Ozick, entitled “Who Owns Anne Frank?” which wondered if it might have been better had the diary been lost, never to receive the adaptations, edits, and appropriations (Ozick uses the term “bowdlerizations”) that marked its rise to international prominence.

The copyright on the Goodrich-Hackett play restricted Kesselman to altering no more than 10 percent of the text, but in reading the script, one sees that some of Meyer Levin’s (and others’) objections to the original text have been addressed, particularly the criticism that in an attempt to make the story more “universal,” the specific Jewish elements were soft-pedaled, or excised entirely. Kesselman’s version does away with Goodrich and Hackett’s framing device of Otto and Miep discovering the Diary on a visit to the Secret Annex after the war. Instead, we are placed on the first day of the Franks’ going into hiding—and the most indelible image is that of the yellow Stars of David sewn prominently onto every garment they are wearing. Later, during the Hannukah scene, Kesselman replaces the Goodrich-Hackett’s jolly English party song with a traditional Hebrew hymn and prayers. At no point are we allowed to forget (as some viewers of the Broadway production reportedly did) why these people were in forced into hiding.

Unlike the 1950s writers, Kesselman had access to the 1995 Definitive Edition of the Diary, which restored five pages cut by Otto Frank for the original European and American publications, and she includes passages about Anne’s sexual awakening reading her art history textbook and experimenting with a friend. We hear the actress on stage read and embody the lines from her diary, at times speaking them directly to the audience, instead of just hearing her in voice over. In Meyer Levin’s script, a narrator keeps the audience appraised of the historical events occurring while the Franks are in hiding; Kesselman uses the more-adept device of radio broadcasts to a similar effect, including the broadcast from the exiled Dutch minister of education that encouraged Anne, during her final months in hiding, to revise and edit her diary with an eye toward future publication.

Kesselman’s most devastating alteration comes at the end of the play. Otto Frank’s new epilogue, describing in detail the fate of each occupant of the Secret Annex, fills in the grisly details for us, perhaps, at long last fulfilling Meyer Levin’s original ambition for the diary: to convey to the world what was destroyed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, so that it might never forget the horrors that Levin and Otto Frank witnessed first-hand.

But in the last half of the twentieth century, “never again” has happened countless times: in Cambodia, Africa, the former Yugoslavia, China, the Soviet Union... Anne’s last words to us aren’t the optimistic “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” but a darker vision, one that speaks less to the sunny optimism of the 1956 Anne Frank of Broadway, and more to the complexity, maturity, and thoughtfulness of the real writer of the Diary: “I see the world slowly being transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions.”

For Further Reading:

Bloom, Harold, ed. A Scholarly Look at the Diary of Anne Frank. 1999. – Includes the New Yorker article by Cynthia Ozick, as well as other writings about the book, play, and film.

Frank, Anne. Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex. Trans. Michael Mok and Ralph Manheim. 1983. – Other short stories and fiction written by Anne Frank before and during her time in hiding.

Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession with Anne Frank. 1995.

Levin, Meyer. The Obsession. 1973.

Lindwer, Willy. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Trans. Alison Meersschaert. 1988. – The stories of six women who knew Anne Frank, including Anne’s friend Hanneli (Hannah Pick-Goslar), who is one of the last people to see Anne alive at Bergen-Belsen.

Melnick, Ralph. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank. 1997.

Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. 2009.

Photo Sources:

Page from The Diary of Anne Frank: Arjunpuri's Blog, http://arjunpuri.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/a-tribute-to-anne-frank-whose-innocence-touched-many-lives/

Meyer Levin: All About Jewish Theatre, http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=3371

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett: Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-Gi-Ha/Goodrich-Frances-and-Albert-Hackett.html

Wendy Kesselman: Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, http://www.castlehill.org/workshops_writing.html

Anne Frank's Diary: AnneFrank.org, http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?lid=2&pid=122.

New Video for "Anne Frank"!

Check out our video promo for "The Diary of Anne Frank"

"Toward a living future" - Assistant Director Elizabeth Creely on "The Diary of Anne Frank"

Helping a play come to life is an amazing experience; acting as the Assistant Director for Custom Made Theater’s production of the “The Diary of Anne Frank” was no exception. Playwright Wendy Kesselman’s 1991 adaptation emphasizes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Secret Annex. The doomed inhabitants of 963 Prinsengracht Place seem to be in some sort of purgatory; not truly incarcerated, in the correct sense of the word and yet certainly not free. They occupied the annex for two and a half years before they were discovered and sent east, to the death camps.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett first adapted the diary for a play in 1955. Kesselman’s version is significantly different. It challenges our perceptions of who Anne really was. Was she a sprightly young girl, wise beyond her years? Or an indulged, attention-seeking teen, who disliked her mother? Kesselman attempts to come to terms with the emotionally tumultuous young girl in part through directing our attention to Anne’s adolescence itself. Anne entered the annex just as her body entered puberty. Along with the demands of hiding, she had the additional challenge of contending with the onset of reproductive maturity and adolescent sexuality, in an atmosphere that couldn’t provide much, if any, privacy. In this atmosphere of constant intrusion and interruption, she finds solace in the pages of her diary, confessing there to a moment of same sex desire, the beginning of her menstrual cycle, and the delightfully bewildering sensuality she feels with her adolescent body and mind. “ I feel spring...spring awakening!” she says to us, her audience. “ I long for every boy!” Very different from the depictions of the sprightly, and chaste Anne many American children read about in high school classrooms.

This is a young girl who is waking up, quickly- maybe too quickly?- to the pleasures and seductions of adult sexuality. No wonder her mother worries about Anne’s frequent visits to the attic, where Peter awaits her. “It’s cold up in the attic”, Mrs. Frank says.” You’d better bundle up”. What tension her mother must have experienced, watching her daughter grow, knowing that a sweater is flimsy protection against the lure of sexuality. “ We can’t call any doctors,” says Mr. Frank in the beginning of the play.” We can’t get sick”. The management of all eight bodies- adult and child- would have been a constant source of tension and threat, especially the rapid growth of the adolescents, growing so surely to adulthood.

To the Bay Area audience, the admissions of a maturing young girl may not seem unduly shocking. Her father, Otto Frank, excised these portions from her diary in order to give her the privacy he couldn’t while they were in hiding. He may also have felt that Anne’s feelings were a distraction from what really needed to be discussed: the rigors of self-imprisonment and Hitler’s intent to eliminate European Jewish culture as systematically as possible- one Jewish family, one Jewish individual- at a time. The horrors of World War II were the reason the diary was published and the play, and film, written. Not Anne’s growing body. Future audiences needed to remember, to never forget.

Forgetting- or setting aside- exactly what happened to the Franks, Van Daans’ and Mr. Dussel was unavoidable for me, at least for the first few weeks of the rehearsal period. This is when important production priorities are met: actors get “off book” and internalize their dialogue; they synch their dialogue with the map of movement and motion the director has choreographed; the director, the actors and the crew discuss motivation and prop needs; the technical director lights the playing space; the sound technician creates a world of sound: all of this needs to be planned and negotiated, as the cast and crew commit themselves to the huge task of mastering the elements of a fully staged production.

But at some point, it became impossible for me to ignore what was being reenacted. I watched bodies get herded out of a room at gunpoint. I saw a mother and her two children watch, helpless, as their beloved husband and father is taken from them. And during Otto Frank’s closing monologue, I heard of the fates of each of the eight inhabitants of the Secret Annex. “Auschwitz. Separation.” says Mr. Frank, reciting the location and circumstance of each death. “Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt. Date of death unknown. Mr. Dussel dies in Neuengamme.” Date of death unknown. Precise location of body? Impossible to establish. Last words, last thoughts? Unrecorded. Their bodies? Destroyed. Finally deprived of life, the children’s growth stopped forever.

Which is why the inclusion of Anne’s monologue about her sexual desire and growing awareness of her adult body matter so much. This is where the play became real to me; it is during this monologue that I felt Anne’s spirit become animate. It was also because of very skilled acting by 15-year old Julia Belanoff, who plays Anne with such insight and sensitivity. “I’m lucky. I’ve been healthy. In fact, I’ve been growing!” Anne says, exultantly, in a monologue during the second act. It’s during this monologue that the Final Solution, international in scope and impact, becomes personal: Hitler and his allies meant for Anne not to grow. Not to gain a shoe size; never to wear a bra and certainly not to get her period. Her body may have vanished, but we have her words to reassure us that she experienced growth, spiritual, sexual. Like a healthy plant compressed under a glass container, Anne’s body continued to develop, as long as it could. During that last two and a half years, it unknowingly resisted the Nazi’s plans, as fundamentally as the French resistance defied the Vichy regime or as the Dutch resisted the Nazi invasion of Holland. Anne is notable because she wrote; she is heart-wrenchingly ordinary at the same time. She was one of many adolescent Jewish girls in Europe, all dreaming of adulthood, all thinking of themselves in the future tense, and all watching, with pleasure, apprehension and anticipation, their bodies reach forward through time, toward a living future.

Before the Secret Annex

Last week we opened our production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Wendy Kesselman. This powerful adaptation tells the story of eight Jews hiding during the Holocaust. Today assistant director Elizabeth Creeley took some time to let us know who these people were and what happened before they walked onto our stage.

The Frank family in 1941.

The story of the Secret Annex begins with Anne’s father, Otto Frank. It was he, along with his staff and rescuers—Meip Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleinman and Victor Gustav Kugler—who first thought of hiding from the Nazis and their Dutch allies within the city itself, at the offices and warehouse of his business, Opekta, a manufacturing firm located at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

Otto Frank was born May 12, 1889, in Frankfurt to a prosperous Jewish family, which had been involved in banking and commerce since the mid-nineteenth century and had lived in Frankfurt for generations. Otto was brought up well, amidst turn-of-the-century German culture. He was schooled at private institutions and came of age, secure in the knowledge that his class and his culture—secular and thoroughly assimilated—were based in inheritable, stable institutions. He graduated from the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, and enrolled in the University of Heidelberg. After cutting short his studies, he traveled in New York to work in the office of Macy’s Department Store for a time. After a broken engagement and the death of his father, he returned to Germany once in 1909 and then for good in 1911, just three years before Germany invaded Belgium and the First World War began.

He was drafted into the Kaiser’s army and rose to the rank of Lieutenant, a fact which later gave pause to the arresting officer, SS-Oberscharführer Karl Joseph Silberbauer, during the arrest of the occupants of the Secret Annex. Silberbauer later claimed to Austrian authorities that he had treated the prisoners “courteously” during the arrest, because of Otto Frank’s status as a lieutenant in the First World War.

Otto Frank met Edith Holländer when she was twenty-five and he was thirty-six. Shy and a devoutly observant Jew, Edith was born in Aachen, a German city close to the Dutch border. They married in Aachen in 1925. Nine months later, in February 1926, Edith gave birth to Margot Betti in Frankfurt am Main. Three years later, on June 12, 1926, Annaliese Marie or “Anne” was born.

After a failed banking venture, and with one eye on the rising anti-semitism in Germany, Otto Frank moved his family to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the summer of 1933, after staying for a short time with Edith’s mother In Aachen. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, were introduced. Otto and his family became non-citizens, stripped of their national identity, belonging to no nation, and no state.

Otto Frank sits in the center surrounded by his Opekta co-workers. Miep is seated to the left and Kugler ("Kraler") stands to the right.

The Frank family thus joined an estimated 355,278 Jews who left Germany and Austria, panicked by the hatred of the Nazi government and desperate to escape the certain persecution and death that awaited them. Otto began a new life as the owner and director of Opekta, a manufacturer of pectin to be used in jam making. Once in Amsterdam, Otto met and hired three people, all destined to play a crucial role on the hiding of the Frank family: Meip Gies, an Austrian-born woman sent to live in Amsterdam at a young age due to illness and Victor Kugler (given the pseudonym “Mr. Kraler” by Anne in her diary). These two, with the active assistance of several others, including Miep’s husband Jan and Opekta staff members Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman, formed a lifeline that connected of the inhabitants of the Secret Annex to the outside world.

Otto, in an effort to diversify Opekta’s commercial base, formed a business partnership with Hermann van Pels (“Mr. van Daan”). Hermann van Pels was born in Gehrde, Germany, in 1890 to a family of butchers and sausage makers. Hermann and Auguste van Pels (“Mrs. van Daan”), née Röttgen, were married in Osnabruck and had one son, Peter, who was born in 1926. Nazi prohibitions against Jews owning businesses meant that Herman and his sister, Ida, were forced to sell the van Pels’ meat seasoning business. Shortly thereafter, the van Pels fled from the rapidly deteriorating situation in Germany, arriving in Amsterdam during June 1937. The van Pels family lived in the same neighborhood as the Franks. In 1938, Otto Frank hired Hermann van Pels as a herbal specialist and formed a new company to prepare and distribute spices, Pectacon.

The last Jewish refugee to enter the story of the Secret Annex was a man named Fritz Pfeffer (“Mr. Dussel”), a dentist. A tall, handsome, athletic man, Pfeffer was on the periphery of the Franks’ social circle, having been known by Miep Gies, whose dentist shared a surgery with Pfeffer. Fritz Pfeffer was born in Giessen, Germany, and after a first marriage ended in divorce, fled to Amsterdam, registered as a Jewish refugee, and met and fell in love with a Christian woman, Charlotte Kaletta. They tried to marry but could not, due Nazi-era “Blood Protection Laws,” segregationist laws which were a part of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws prohibited sexual relations between Jews and Christians, as well as marriage.

Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank went into hiding on July 6, 1942, and were joined on July 13 by Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels. Fritz Pfeffer joined them in November, forming a group of self-incarcerated Jews, hiding in the tiny upstairs attic of the Opekta offices and warehouse. The eight lived together in the cramped annex (Achterhuis or “back house”) for two-and-a-half years, from July 1942 to August 4, 1944.

Photo Credits and Further Reading:

“The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition.” Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Doubleday, New York, 1989.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, “36 Questions About the Holocaust” http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663.

Anne Frank.org, "Overview" www.annefrank.org.

The Anne Frank Guide, "Date" http://www.annefrankguide.net/en-GB/bronnenbank.asp?aid=10679.

Arjunpuri's Blog "A tribute to Anne Frank whose innocence touched many lives" http://arjunpuri.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/a-tribute-to-anne-frank-whose-innocence-touched-many-lives/.

USA Today "Rescuer of Anne Frank's Diary Marks 100th Birthday" http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-02-12-annefrank-helper_N.htm.

Rapp on Rapp

This week the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Adam Rapp in anticipation of our Bay Area premiere of Red Light Winter. You can read it at SFGate.com. It's an interesting and honest look into Rapp's process. We were inspired and looked up other Rapp interviews. Here are some of the most elucidating quotes we found.


"I wrote it [Red Light Winter] in 2003. I was on the West Coast, auditioning people for my first film. For some reason I started about the time I spent with a best friend in Amsterdam back in 1997. My friend was very depressed and was having a hard time connecting to the world. He'd lost a girlfriend. In Amsterdam I thought it would be good for him to get back on the horse. So I went window-shopping in the red light district for a woman for him. I met a woman, we slept together, and I gave her more money so I could send my friend to her, too. She was a Greek premed student, purportedly, very beautiful and sweet. He had an amazing time and developed an irrational obsession with her. In LA, I went back to my hotel room and started writing a play about two friends who both sleep with the same prostitute. The play is very much fiction. People want to believe it's directly autobiographical, but I just borrowed the triangle."

Foster, Catherine. A 'Red Light' Rapp on love, sex, friendship. The Boston Globe.
(July 14, 2006).
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/07/14/a_red_light_rapp_on_love_sex_friendship/

"I've lived in this building for 17 years, on 10th between 1st and A. I lived here with my brother downstairs, and then when we had landlord problems we were squatting for a while. And I'm still here. Everything I've ever written, I've done from here. Now it's pretty nice, but I've been here with six roommates, crammed in like an artists' colony, everyone eating everybody's yogurt. I look out this tiny, barred window, and it reminds me that we're all in cages, stacked on one another. So I know those kinds of rooms. And my plays always start from the room, one window and a door."

Shaw, Helen. Adam Rapp. Time Out New York, 678. (October 1, 2008).
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york

"I always imagine the room that these characters are in, there's usually a door and there's usually a window, and I like to work with weather and I like to work with why people leave. And if they leave they have to have a really good reason. So my first act might be an entire scene in this one room, and that's happened in a lot of my plays. […] When I'm writing for theater I can take my time, and you can use real time and real space and characters can breath and they can really want what's in the other character's pocket and they can really take their time getting there and you can drop story plot points in a way that's framed and takes it's time."

Leeds, Douglas B. (Host). The Playwright. American Theatre Wing: Working in the Theatre.
(December, 2006).
http://americantheatrewing.org/seminars/detail/playwrights_12_06

"[Writing] does take me to a dark place and I get mad at the characters and want them to be better people, less selfish, etc. But I also love them. I care a great deal for Horlick [a character in Ball Peen Hammer] and I resisted his fate in the story. But I feel I'm at my best when my characters are pulling me in complicated directions."

Hogan, John. Apocalypse Now. Graphic Novel Reporter.
http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/apocalypse-now-interview

"I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place. … I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun."

"There's nothing better than when I'm in the middle of a play. I can't wait to wake up to write. I mean, sex is good and drugs are great, sometimes. But there's nothing better than that kind of ephemeral longing that you feel-that yearning right before you wake up. That I can't wait to get back in that room with those people. That's what I'm addicted to."

Norman, Marsha. Adam Rapp. BOMB, 95. (Spring 2006).
http://www.bombsite.com/issues/95/articles/2819

"Well it's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life. And my life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills - now I have someone who pays my bills - and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me. And just once I start I can go for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I forget to eat, and the only thing I really break for is to play basketball and to walk around outside and just get some fresh air. A lot of times, days melt away; and when I'm in that zone, I love that it's like going down a rabbit hole that I enjoy. "

Gilboe, Michael. Broadway Bullet Interview: Playwright Adam Rapp. Broadway World.com.
(March 26, 2007).
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Broadway_Bullet_Interview_Playwright_Adam_Rapp_20070326

"When I started writing, I was a novelist. When I discovered theater - actually, more precisely - what I discovered while writing music was an immediate jolt that accompanied the process, something that takes a novel three-hundred pages to accomplish, whereas music opened up the floodgates. When theater arrived, it was a new attempt to figure out what that form truly is. You can delay an emotion in such a crystallized emotional container and also have a lyric - which tells a story or abstract a feeling. I was drawn to that and how the potential of storytelling can be living in the same organism. […] A lot of my earlier stuff had songs, and I didn't even know why. I wasn't really playing music, but I was drawn to this moment where someone needs to sing something. I always had this instinct to write songs and just didn't know how to do it. Though I am drawn to specific musical genres - indie rock and classic rock, mostly - I've been engaged by the soul-heavy troubadours, the Nick Drakes, the Bill Callahans, and usually do what novelists do, which is write as though I'm recording a song in my bedroom, you know. Tom Waits is such a great storyteller and a major influence. […] Music is the language of yearning that comes out of an animal cry into thought process. It is joy and love and animal tones; animal language."

Bartels, Brian. Shadow Sounds: Music as Character. Fiction Writers Review. (May 18, 2009).
http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/shadow-sounds-music-as-character-an-interview-with-adam-rapp

Adam Rapp Biography

Tonight we are thrilled to open the Bay Area Premiere of Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter. Rapp has become one of the major playwrights of our time and his is one of the more interesting journeys to playwriting that we've encountered.

Adam Rapp is a critically acclaimed playwright, theater director, novelist, screenwriter, and film director. He was born to Mary Lee and Douglas Rapp in Chicago. His parents divorced when he was five and he, his sister Anne, and his brother Anthony were raised by their mother in Joilet, Illinois. His brother Anthony was a successful child actor and started making more money than his mother, a prison nurse. Thus, when Anthony got into shows outside of Illinois the entire family would have to join him. Adam Rapp found himself repeatedly uprooted from his friends and the life he wanted to have. Resentful of theater and his brother, he finally was allowed to stay in Illinois with his father and stepmother. He became delinquent and they sent him to reform school. From there he went to a military high school and finally turned himself around. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and there found himself in a poetry class. He quickly changed his major to fiction writing and, when he graduated, moved to New York City to pursue a writing career.

His first published work was Missing the Piano, a young adult novel in 1994. It was well received and won multiple awards from the American Library Association. Since then he has written six other young adult novels (The Buffalo Tree, The Copper Elephant, Little Chicago, 33 Snowfish, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog and Punkzilla). One, The Buffalo Tree, created some controversy in 2005 when a Pennsylvania school board banned it from their curriculum. Adam Rapp has also written the graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer and the adult novel The Year of Endless Sorrows.

Despite their earlier sibling animosity, Adam Rapp read his early short stories to his younger brother, Anthony, and they became close as adults, eventually sharing an apartment in New York. Despite his grudge towards theater, Rapp went to see his brother in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Previously he had thought of theater as solely light musical comedies, Six Degrees of Separation was the first time he experienced theater as something that could be moving. He began reading plays voraciously and was further inspired by such playwrights as Samuel Shepard, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Naomi Wallace, Sarah Kane, Richard Nelson and Irene Fornes. He started to play with the form and an early play caught the eye of Marsha Norman, co-director of Juliard's playwriting program. She encouraged Adam Rapp to join them in their prestigious two year playwriting fellowship.

After the fellowship Adam Rapp wrote a number of plays that didn't get produced. He became once again disillusioned with theater and quickly ran out of money. Right before he gave up on theater, his play Nocturne got picked up at A.R.T. in Cambridge and with critical acclaim soon was produced off-Broadway. He soon had a suite residency with Mabou Mines in 2000 and won the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights.

For the next five years he continued to find success off-Broadway and in 2005 he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his play Red Light Winter. First produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Red Light Winter was a fantastic success and was awarded the 2005 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work. It subsequently had an Obie Award winning run with Adam Rapp directing. Rapp's other plays include Netherbones, Ghosts in the Cottonwood, Trueblinka, Blackfrost, Night of the Whitefish, Finer Noble Gasses, Faster, Dreams of the Salthorse, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Train Story, Gompers, Members Only, Essential Self Defense, American Silgo, Blackbird, Bingo with The Indians, The Metal Children, Kindness and Classic Kitchen Timer. He is currently the resident playwright for Edge Theater Company in New York.

Since Red Light Winter Adam Rapp has continued to direct many of his plays as well as some works by other authors. He directed his first feature film, Winter Passing, in 2005. He both directed and adapted his next film, Blackbird, from his earlier play of the same name. He also worked in television as a creative consultant for a season of The L Word. When not working, Rapp is an avid outdoor basketball player and musician. Once a member of the band Bottomside, he now plays guitar and sings with Less the Band, a band consisting of cast members from Rapp's play Finer Noble Gasses.

Much of Adam Rapp's work uses his own difficult life as a starting place. His plays and novels are known for their gritty and stark realism. His protagonists are generally in their twenties or thirties and he values bringing in audiences of that generation. There is a perpetual sense that his characters are waiting for inevitable tragedy, and yet he finds comedy in the harsh and painful worlds he creates. Adam Rapp is one of our great contemporary young playwrights and is well set to continue to make an impact on the theater scene for years to come.


Photo Credits and Further Reading:

Answers.com profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.answers.com/topic/adam-rapp-children-s-author

The Free Library's Profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Profile: Adam Rapp.-a0126556707
Biblio.com's Biography: http://www.biblio.com/author_biographies/2045398/Adam_Rapp.html

The Vineyard Theatre's Interview Adam Rapp: Vineyard Theatre. http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/interview-metalchildren.htm

Associated Press article on the School Board banning The Buffalo Tree: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=15137

A New York Press Article on Less the Band: http://www.nypress.com/article-19130-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.html

Top photo from Theatremania's article on Red Light Winter: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/news/05-2005/all-over-the-map_6030.html

Bottom photo Time Out New York's interview with Adam Rapp: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york