Anne Frank puppet created for Theater J’s production of Compulsion. TO BE USED ONLY IN CONJUNCTION WITH PERFORMANCE PROMOTION. Image from reporter, Celia Wren, celiawren@hotmail.com. Credit: Photo by Adam Immerwahr
(Celia Wren’s article appeared in The Washington Post, 1/25.
Playwright Rinne B. Groff’s semi-fictional tale follows the struggle to turn the Holocaust diary into a stage production.
A marionette of the Anne Frank character in Theater J’s production of “Compulsion or the House Behind.” (Adam Immerwahr)
Marionettes may not immediately spring to mind when you think about one of the 20th century’s most revered texts: the diary of Anne Frank. But puppetry is integral to playwright Rinne B. Groff’s “Compulsion or the House Behind,” inspired by the passion and obsession of one of the diary’s key American popularizers.
The puppetry “has a real purpose” in the show says Matt Acheson, who designed the marionettes for Theater J’s production of “Compulsion,” and did the same for the play’s 2010 world premiere, a co-production by Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and New York’s Public Theater. The “Compulsion” marionettes in his view mirror the battle of wills Groff’s semi-fictional play depicts: a creative, commercial and legal tug-of-war beginning in the 1950s, during the attempt to turn the Anne Frank story into a stage production.
“You’re watching people pull it this way, pull it that way. ‘Make it dance like this! Make it more universal! We gotta take this out! We gotta put this in!’ Everybody’s coming in now and pulling a string of this story,” Acheson says.
To this day, puppetry remains a resonant metaphor for our relationship to Frank, says Johanna Gruenhut, who directs Theater J’s production, scheduled to run in person from Jan. 26 to Feb. 20, with a streaming option beginning Feb. 8.
“We all have a vision of who Anne is, in our own lives, and we create her for ourselves,” says Gruenhut, Theater J’s associate artistic director. “We sort of ‘puppet’ her, so that we feel connected to her in our own way.”
“Compulsion” draws on the true story of Meyer Levin, an early devotee of the diary Anne Frank kept while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam warehouse annex. An author and sometime war correspondent, Levin encountered the diary after it was published in Europe following Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He championed the work in America and particularly yearned to adapt it for the stage, so as to acquaint a wide audience with an invaluable first-person witness to the Holocaust.
A With the blessing of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, Levin wrote an adaptation. But his script was rejected in favor of a dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which ultimately opened on Broadway in 1955 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Levin thought his script had been nixed because it gave due attention to the story’s Jewish dimension, which, in his view, the producing team wanted to downplay. He turned paranoid and litigious, going so far as to sue Otto Frank.
“Compulsion” imagines a similar chain of events precipitated by a Levin-like character named Sid Silver, portrayed at Theater J by Paul Morella. (Mandy Patinkin originated the role in 2010.) Over 30 years, his passion for the diary’s eloquence and authority spirals into irrational possessiveness and a persecution complex, and his career and relationships suffer. “We will see a man who was totally consumed with the thing he loves the most,” says Gruenhut — one whose story reflects how “obsession can be very beautiful, but also be our potential downfall,”
Underscoring Silver’s mania are non-naturalistic moments in which Anne and other characters appear in marionette form. In addition to the puppetry’s metaphorical overtones of manipulation, a historical fact justifies the conceit: Levin ran a marionette theater in Chicago in the 1930s.
