Compulsion
Written by Rinne Groff
Directed by Devon de Mayo
Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Evanston (map)
thru Nov 17 | tickets: $30-$40 | more info
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One man’s obsession of a universal tragedy
Next Theatre presents
Compulsion
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Compulsion is well-named. Rinne Groff’s driving drama depicts one man’s obsession with a tragedy that was more universal than he could allow.
A bit of background: Six million may have died between 1939 and 1945 but Anne Frank, who would have been 84 today, remains the human face for the Holocaust. More importantly, over three generations later her diary endures, an appeal to our collective decency. Four months after Anne’s death from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her father Otto Frank acquired that precious keepsake from the family’s Dutch savior Miep Gies. Reading “The Diary of a Young Girl” has become a coming-of-age rite of passage for teens everywhere and, for grownups, a conscience-keeper they can never outgrow. It chronicles, of course, the two years during which Anne and her family and two other Jewish refugees hid in the “secret annex” above Otto’s Amsterdam office—until an employee informed on them and the Gestapo arrested them in 1944.
A Chicago premiere by Next Theatre Company, Devon de Mayo’s suitably driven staging is fueled by Mick Weber’s anguished author. Weber’s often out-of-control Sid Silver (as Levin is called) is a man on a mission to control a legacy. We see the increasingly paranoid Silver in escalating encounters with Doubleday literary editor Miss Mermin (Jenny Avery, demonstrating the agonies of grace under too much pressure) and publisher Ferris (John Byrnes), showing less patience with the often insufferable Silver).
Silver is enraged that Eleanor Roosevelt, a non-Jew, gets to write the preface. He’s even more incensed when non-Jews Goodrich and Hackett get the rights from Otto Frank to create the highly successful 1955 Broadway adaptation The Diary of Anne Frank, which wins a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Silver convinces himself that Lillian Hellman and Cheryl Crawford sabotaged his chances to get the green light for the drama version, then that his version was plagiarized even though Goodrich and Hackett never saw it.
Years later, the second act depicts a still-seething Silver in Israel during the Six-Day War. Here the true believer exhausts the patience of his much younger French wife (Avery). He almost tricks a theater connected with the Israeli army to perform his authentically Jewish version of Anne’s diary. Finally, fanatical to a fault, Silver all but pleads for Otto Frank’s murder as he denounces both Communists and conservatives for the failure of his dream. If he wins one court case, that only encourages him to sue even more. When he denounces an opponent with “Who got to you?,” the answer can only be “YOU got to you!”
The secret success of Compulsion is that, however obnoxious Silver’s crusade, we see his side. It’s demonstrated, bizarrely but persuasively, by hand puppets of Anne, Peter and finally Silver, who speak lines from the diary: In one strange scene Anne appears to Sid in bed to encourage him to rescue her from the popularizers.
Clearly, Levin/Silver feared that Anne’s story would be commercialized and generalized. He argued that if it succumbed to sentiment over situation, it wouldn’t be the rallying cry against anti-Semitism that, of course, Anne never meant to write. We’ll never know if Levin’s dramatization, not published but finally produced in 1966 in Israel and in 1972 at Brandeis University, was superior to the now-traditional drama and the 1959 film version (that indeed lacked Jews in the major roles). But there’s something both scary and magnificent in this man’s dogged commitment to a teenager who believed, against all the evidence, that people are basically good.
It’s fitting and right, then, that the puppet Anne gets the last word(s).
Rating: ★★★
Compulsion continues through November 17th at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston (map), with performances Thursdays at 7:30pm, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays 2pm. Tickets are $30-$40, and are available by phone (847-475-1875 x2) or online through PrintTixUSA.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at NextTheatre.org. (Running time: 2 hours, includes an intermission)
Photos by Michael Brosilow
artists
cast
Jenny Avery (Mrs. Silver, Mermin), John Byrnes (Mr. Ferris, others), Mick Weber (Sid Silver)
behind the scenes
Devon de Mayo (director), Grant Sabin (set design), Heather Gilbert (lighting design), Jesse Mooney-Bullock (puppetry design), Mieka Vanderploeg (costume design), Kevin O’Donnell (sound design, composition), Eileen Rozycki (prop design), Amber Johnson (stage manager), Adam Liston (production manager), Michael Brosilow (photos)
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