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.