Interview with Director Brian Katz and Dramaturge Perry Aliado

Optimism and Its Discontents:

Thoughts on Voltaire and Candide with CMTC Artistic Director Brian Katz

Recently, CMTC Resident Dramaturge Perry Aliado sat down with Artistic Director Brian Katz to talk about his upcoming production of Candide of California, or Optimism, a play adaptation of the French novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme by Voltaire. Prior forays into literary adaptation for Brian Katz include directing The Soldier of the Sorrowful Face by Nicholas Leither, an adaptation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Some topics in this chat included the process of adapting literary works to the stage, addressing current events in the play, and the philosophical idea of “Optimism” (and the great disillusionment it can bring about).

Perry Aliado: Why did you decide to adapt Candide back in 2008, and re-stage it again now in 2011?

Brian Katz: For some history on the project – we did Candide, but just the 1st act (up to the second departure from Cunegonde) for the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2008. It is a “top 5” book for me, first of all, and so when looking for projects to adapt, you start looking at things you’ve already been obsessed with. And I am obsessed with Candide; I re-read it about every year because I always get something new out of it.

What we’ve done with Candide (in ’08 and ’11) is modernize it a bit by doing a hybrid. I wanted to keep most of Voltaire’s words, because they’re just that funny, but I also wanted to make sure the play was immediately relevant and recognizable to our time. We lose the French history and instead use events and places we are familiar with, wars we are familiar with, and then hopefully find funny and creative ways to adapt the mystical places in the book, like El Dorado.

PA: Were there any specific then-current events from 2008 that drew you further into wanting to adapt and stage Candide?

BK: Well it sure seems to be a funny time around here. We had Schwarzenegger, and he makes a cameo in our play. Obviously the wars in Iraq – when I was writing the play in 2007 – seemed to be never-ending. Politicians appeared to be on the news daily justifying this war, sometimes with religious overtones, even after all of our initial reasons (including the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction) just went out the window. The religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan certainly remind me of the Inquisitors and other religious figures in the book. That said, the Church is not a big part of this adaptation. They show up once in a while in the play, but you have to remember that the Church was the State back then; they had an extreme influence on the State.

We also wanted to connect the El Dorado to the abuse of natural resources – we moved El Dorado to Antarctica, with the slowly disappearing ice shelf. We’re trying to draw parallels between what the explorers of the El Dorado did then with what we’re doing to our planet right now.

Perry: How about for 2011?

Brian: For better or worse, I think it’s really just more of the same. For this production in 2011, I wanted to second act to take more time to discuss Voltaire’s philosophy; it’s partly because of me just getting a little older, three years later, and having more of an interest in drawing out these philosophical ideas of the show. Whereas the first act is a little more vaudeville and goofy and definitely fun to do, now I have become much more interested in really breaking down the concept of “Optimism” and the different philosophies we have brought into the show to contrast against it.

Perry: Speaking of philosophies, are there any philosophies of Voltaire’s that you strongly connect with, or strongly agree or disagree with? And how do you connect these ideas with the present day?

Brian: Well, Voltaire was a Deist. Voltaire did believe in a God, but he did not believe in organized religion, which was tied to the State. Personally and politically, I absolutely respect religious figure, like Catholic Priests, Reform Rabbis on a lot of issues. They’re at the forefront of a lot of poverty work and anti-war resistance and all kinds of other great stuff. But like Voltaire, I have some distrust of the institution of religion.

The whole book is written against the idea of “optimism”, against this idea that everything that happens (good or bad) is for the best. If you believe that everything is for the best, then Voltaire says that you have to take that way thinking that to its extreme. From there, you can become passive and complacent, accepting all things as they are, or worse, you manipulate things to fit your personal wants and desires like all the evil people in the book do.

Perry: Can you talk a little bit more about your own thoughts about Voltaire’s “Optimism”?

Brian: Candide’s path to his disillusionment with Optimism is a path that everyone finds when they go from being the “optimist” or “romantic” to understanding that the real world rarely functions that way. We should feel happy that we don’t have to go through the extreme and satirical crap that Candide has to go through, but I think Candide’s journey to reaching his enlightenment is a hysterical one. He learns quickly that there may not be an all-encompassing “good karma” or religious God looking down and reassuring us that everything will be OK in the end. Then does genocide happen for the best? Or starvation? Or rape? And personally, people who try to justify these acts as being “for the best,” done through God’s good will or the nature of the Universe, drive me insane. Candide is my most favorite reaction to that way of thinking. It’s done through biting and hysterical satire, and it’s a laugh-out-loud funny book.

Perry: Could you talk a little bit about your process of adapting a literary work for the stage, because I know this isn’t the first classic work that you’ve turned into a play.

Brian: First and foremost, I’m a director and not a playwright – in spite of the fact that I write a play once in a while. I had the honor to watch the Mary Zimmerman process when she was working on Journey to the West [first produced in 1995 with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre]. I’m not brave enough to do what she did, which was bring in three pages of text a day to rehearsal based on what happened the day before. Her rehearsal process is a scary but exciting and unbelievably organic process. But I have some similarity to that process in that I didn’t want to write a ton a text that was already set before the rehearsal process began. I really wanted to see what the actors did with the text and how they adjusted to the words. It makes it very difficult on our Tech staff, as well as the actors of course, who constantly have to memorize text that could change at a moment’s notice. But it’s allowed me to see what the actors can do and see what creative choices I can make with staging.

As far as the actual writing, I just stare at the book at lot. I steal a lot from the book – we give Voltaire authorship credit, and there’s a reason for that, because the witticisms are so great in the book, you just want to keep them and say them in the play. Then I put the book down for a bit and begin to write some filler to make it into a play – some narration, some dialogue so that people are talking to each other – but throughout the process, I keep going back to the book. And when things aren’t working, the solution has almost always been in the book itself, especially when I try to get too creative and silly. Voltaire is a much better writer.

Perry: Generally speaking, what are some of your pros and cons of working on a new work versus working on an already-established play where you don’t have to tweak the text a week before Opening Night?

Brian: There’s a separate question in there, in that if I had a playwright with me and I was solely doing the directing, then that’s already an established process – the playwright is there to make all the adjustments to the script, while I only worry about directing. As both director and adapter, the challenging part is trying to figure out where the issues or problems truly lie. Perhaps it could be directorial instincts, in that maybe my staging doesn’t flow, or I need to work with the actors on interpretation. Or maybe I’ve just written some bad dialogue or I’ve been unclear in the transition from the book to the script.

When you’re doing an [Edward] Albee or [Tony] Kushner or Tennessee Williams, it’s much easier to act a great playwright, because they have an unbelievable wonderful control over how the play flows. And when the play is coming from someone like me, we all have to work a little harder to make things work. That said, I would love more opportunities to do this work; it’s a hard process, and getting better at it will be lifelong, I’m sure.

Perry: What have been some of the really great or experiences you’ve had with the cast working on this piece?

Brian: Pretty much from the first day, I told the cast that I’m not married to anything. I’m more likely to defend a line from the book than one of my own written lines. I had a discussion with some cast members the other day – they were asking about why Pangloss says that syphilis is good even though he got it. Voltaire calls it a “gift” in several different versions I’ve read – and I held fast on that one to keep Voltaire’s language and poetry intact in describing this disease. But even then, the actors have always been great. They offer suggestions – because I’m a director first – and if they have a better way of saying a line, then it goes in the play.

We’ve also been doing some improvising. There’s a bit in there where we figure out Paquette’s backstory to help explain why she hasn’t been seen or heard from on stage for the last hour-and-a-half, only to then “magically” re-appear at the end of the book. We have the actors improvise the different people Paquette has been in contact with during this time. And just like the book, it’s sad and disturbing when you see and think about her fate, but it’s absolutely funny in its presentation.

Physicality is a very important part of this showt. Some challenges included how to depict roasting Candide on a stick, or how to make an airplane. And so we had to get back to the basics. Some of this stuff we figured out at the Fringe. But I also kept going back to when I watched Mary Zimmerman’s work in Chicago, she was so open to whatever happened in the process – so we would throw out some ideas on how to depict flying on stage, try them all, and see which one sticks. And all that work is done in collaboration with the actors.

Perry: Any final things you’d like to say, especially to potential audience members who might want to come to see this show?

Brian: It’s a really funny show. And for the people who’ve never read Voltaire, or who may have read Voltaire back in high school but forgotten his writings, he’s really, really FUNNY. There are intense political and philosophical discussions in his writing. But when he does satire – and this book [Candide] is considered his masterpiece – he’s probably one of the funniest guys who’s ever lived. He’s Mark Twain funny. And in the book, it feels like every four paragraphs or so, for quite a few chapters, Candide is whisked off somewhere else. It’s almost like the original travelogue play. And that’s a lot of fun in itself, because you get all these different set pieces and it goes by super fast – it’s like a “fasten-your-seatbelt-and get-ready!” kind of ride.

I also love this kind of past-paced, high-energy theatre. It’s probably due to growing up with Chicago theatre – especially late-night Chicago theatre which was really goofy and really irreverent, pass the bottle of whiskey around the audience, and we never worried about offending anybody. And Voltaire offends everybody. On purpose. Equally. To make us question and challenge the ideas we believe.

Candide of California, or Optimism opens Tuesday, May 17^th at the Gough Street Playhouse in San Francisco, and plays until Saturday, June 4^th. Visit www.custommade.org for additional information.

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.

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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.