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.

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"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.