Staying true to uncensored Anne Frank
On an unusually warm evening in Amsterdam last May, Wendy Kesselman, and American
playwright, and James Lapine, an American theater director, climbed the stairs to
the second floor of a magnificent, architecturally complicated old canal house at
263 Prinsengracht. There, they sat down around the same wooden desk at which Otto
Frank had first read his daughter Anne's diary in late 1945.
The book that Otto Frank published would be titled "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young
Girl" in the American version. The thoughts of a sensitive, intelligent, highly observant
Jewish teenager who wanted to be a writer, who hid for two years in the heart of Amsterdam
from the Nazis, then died at their hands when not quite 16, spoke to people around the world.
The fact that Otto Frank eliminated a number of diary passages in which his daughter expressd
anger and frustation at her confinement and with her mother, as well as a sexual frankness
bold for its time, did not cause controversy - perhaps because the extent of the cuts was not
known and perhaps because such thoughts might have been as inappropriate for a young girl at the time.
In retrospect, however, the Anne Frank who emerged in the book appeared to some to be an
impossibly superhuman child.
Americanized version
The book was the basis for "The Diary of Anne Frank," the 1955 Broadway drama starring
Susan Stasberg. An American film version was released in 1959 with Millie Perkins as Anne. In
both versions an attempt was made to make the story more accessible to a variety of viewers, and
some critics maintained that Anne became less Jewish as a result.
Kesselman and Lapine knew, though, that the teenager they were seeking was the unexpurgated,
precocious Anne who listened to clandestine radio broadcasts and understood that the Nazis were
gassing Jews.
Otto Frank eliminated diary passages in which his daughter expressed anger at her confinement, as well
as a sexual frankness.
"It was fine then," Lapine said, about the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the husband-and-wife Hollywood
screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Alber Hackett, who were gentile. "It took the sensitivities of the
period into consideration. But we could not do the same play now."
Last Thursday, Kesselman's "newly adapted" version of the original play opened at the Music Box Theater
in New York, directed by Lapine. The cast includes Natalie Portman, a young actress who appeared in
Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You," as Anne, and George Hearn, Linda Lavin, Harris Yulin and
Sophie Hayden. Miep Gies and another employee of Otto Frank, who risked their lives to bring the families
food and news from the outside world, are also characters in the drama.
On that May evening at 263 Prinsengracht, now a museum known as the Anne Frank House, Lapin and Kesselman
stepped past the bookcase-door in the former offices of Otto Frank's food business and into "the secret annex,"
as Anne called it, the building to the rear.
Birds could be heard at twilight, and an old chestnut tree that Anne spoke fondly of in her diary was visible
from windows that in Anne's day had been heavily shrouded. Moving from room to room, sensing the claustrophobia,
the fear and despair, Kesselman made notes, while Lapine photographed.
Annex re-created
The set designer, Adrianne Lobel, whose mother is a Holocasut survivor, visited the annex for extensive resarch. The
wood moldings, kitchen utensils, toilet, sink, wallpaper and paint colors on the Music Box set are identical to those
in the annex, she said. The attic space, which towers above the stage, has similar beams and windows and has been
re-created in exact dimensions.
Two of the producers of the revival, David Stone and Amy Nederlander-Case, also made the pilgrmage to 263 Prinsengracht
in May. They had approached Lapine two years before with the idea of reviving the play on Broadway. Nerderlander-Case
said lsat week that she had been prompted by the publication in 1995 of "The Definitive Edition" of Anne Frank's diary,
especially by new material that showed Anne to be a teenager full of uncensored opinions and curiosity about the world
around her, including sex.
Anne Frank's optimistic statements, among them, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good
at heart," which ends the 1955 script and is in the current one, have been seen as the prime message of Anne Frank's short
life. Kesselman notes, however, that "the phrase is now part of its original diary entry in the play and has not been
taken out of context as it was in the first version."
The beginning of the 1955 stage version - in which Otto Frank returns from Auschwitz after the war to his old office, where
he reads the diaries Miep Gies saved for him - has been eliminated. The play now opens with a summer thunderstorm as the
Franks arrive, drenched, in the gloomy hiding space.
There are voice-overs in which Portman as Anne reads new material from the diary. And there is an excerpt from a Nazi
rally at which Hitler spoke, plus the sound of speeding trains clicking on tracks.
The new adaptation of the play "gives it an edge, more tension," said Flora Roberts, the agent who represents the Hackett estate.
To critics who have called the Goodrich-Hackett version a de-Semitizing of the most anti-Semitic episode in history, Roberts
has a response: The agent agrees that the original version was "less Jewish" but "that was in line with Mr. Frank's wishes."
"He saw his daughter's legacy as universal," Roberts says.
By Bernard Hammelburg
