“I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” teenager Anne Frank famously wrote in the diary she kept while she and her family hid out in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. But her diary—recovered after the war by her father, Otto—endured as a testament to an indomitable hope for humanity even in the face of unspeakable atrocity. First published in Dutch in 1947, the volume was translated into English and released by Doubleday & Company in 1952. A stage adaptation by the husband-and-wife writing team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (best known for their screenplays for The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, and other lighthearted fare) won the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1959 film version of the play garnered three Oscars.
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The diary had been brought to Doubleday’s attention by Meyer Levin, a Chicago-born writer who’d served as a foreign correspondent during the war. One of the first American journalists to witness the horrors of the Nazi death camps, Levin had come across the Dutch edition and struck up a correspondence with Otto Frank. Having set The Diary of a Young Girl on its path to publication in the U.S., Levin turned around and wrote about it in glowing terms in the New York Times Book Review; he also authored a radio dramatization that was broadcast in 1952 but soon fell into obscurity.
In Groff’s Compulsion, the protagonist is also named Sid Silver. As played by the tall, commanding Mick Weber, Sid is a blustery charmer who becomes fixated not only with the injustice he believes he’s suffered, but with Anne Frank herself. To Sid, she’s an icon of Jewish courage in the face of persecution—a timely symbol in the early 1950s, as Israel struggled to solidify itself as a Jewish state. Ironically, the grace under pressure that Frank embodied is something Sid cannot emulate. He lashes out at “assimilationist communists” and “self-loathing Jews” who, he feels, have tried to “de-Judaize” Frank in order to make her acceptable to “regular audiences.” He even wages a legal campaign against Otto Frank. His success with Leopold and Loeb does nothing to assuage his obsession: “Enough with the murderers! What about the murdered?” he demands.
Through 11/17: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Noyes Cultural Arts Center 927 Noyes Evanston 847-475-1875, ext. 2nexttheatre.org $30-$40
