A ‘Diary’ Even More Devastating

Unbeknownst to the high school students who read the book as homework, “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank is one of the most controversial documents to survive the Holocaust. Writers are arguing still over the proper way to adapt such a precious text--the work of an extraordinary Jewish girl hiding in an Amsterdam garret from age 13 to 15, when she was captured and murdered by the Nazis. Two books in the past two years have recounted a bitter lawsuit on the subject, a controversy that began even before Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were hired to write the 1955 Broadway play that won them a Pulitzer Prize. In October, Cynthia Ozick wrote in the New Yorker that Anne Frank’s memory has been mauled by people who failed to understand or convey the full implications of her story.

Nevertheless, a new adaptation, which Wendy Kesselman based on the Goodrich/Hackett play, opened once again on Broadway Thursday night. Directed with heart-stopping sensitivity by James Lapine, a retouched “Diary of Anne Frank” explains why this work incites emotion that might surround a holy text.

The setting is the cramped secret annex, where Anne and seven others subsisted for 25 months from 1942 to 1944, never going outside, never even gazing out a window in the daylight. As depicted by set designer Adrianne Lobel, the upper two floors of a narrow building are a jumble of small rooms, though the audience’s open-air viewpoint cannot convey the claustrophobia of the actual space.

A budding writer who captured the tensions, the unexpected comedy and romance she experienced there, Anne also was acutely aware of the fates of the Jews outside. Her terrors are interlaced with the preoccupations of a precocious child, a girl who adores her father Otto (George Hearn), who is at odds with her mother Edith (Sophie Hayden) and in competition with her more obedient older sister Margot (whose own fears are beautifully depicted by Missy Yager). Anne also records the fights over food distribution between her family and the bickering Van Daans (Linda Lavin and Harris Yulin), her attraction to their awkward teenage son Peter (Jonathan Kaplan) and her annoyance with the finicky dentist Mr. Dussel (Austin Pendleton). .

Natalie Portman thankfully resists the urge to deify Anne, a girl whose energy and adolescent self-obsessions can irk as well as charm. Portman portrays how she so touchingly veered between confidence and self-doubt. She underplays any hint at martyrdom, and lets the surrounding atmosphere construct the unbearable context to Anne’s story. Her voice-over selections from the diary provide a thread from scene to scene and a glimpse into Anne’s inner life, which grows over time to include musings on the meaning of life and on being a Jew, two subjects on which the young writer was uniquely equipped, by nature and by circumstance, to contribute.

When Dussel, the last character to come into hiding, arrives, he tells the group how their friends and relatives are being shipped in trains to camps in “the east,” and that the trains leave each Tuesday. Later, Anne wakes from a nightmare screaming, “It’s not Tuesday,” and the link between the outside world, her imagination and her own fate is made. Van Daan comments on her screaming--”It sounds as if someone was murdering her”--looking pointedly and somewhat humorously at Dussel, Anne’s contentious roommate. But his comment reverberates from the play’s here to the terrible hereafter, a connection Lapine is extremely deft at handling.

Lapine and Kesselman each do their part to put into relief the surrounding darkness, to link Anne’s story to the suffering of millions that she intuited in her diary. Instead of ending on the much protested, oversimplified “I still believe that people are good at heart” line, this version ends with Otto Frank’s recitation of what happened to Anne at Bergen-Belsen--the terrible, final chapter to the diary that was not written by its author.

Gone is some of the hokey tinkering--the device, for instance, of having Anne’s father give her the diary as a gift while in hiding. As in life, Anne already possesses her diary; she didn’t need anyone to tell her to be a writer. Lapine makes the Van Daans less comical than they were in the 1959 film version. As Mrs. Van Daan, Lavin is witty and dry, not the “silly, sniveling specimen of humanity” that Anne saw her as. Anne adored her father and did not live to see many of his faults; thus he is an unshaded character in the diary, play and movie. But this is Anne’s story, and this is how she experienced him.

Few works are beyond criticism. But Lapine has taken this play to the place where criticism seems irrelevant. When George Hearn as Otto Frank delivers the new coda--which includes the fates of the seven other Jews in hiding--the grief is unbearable. Anne Frank’s voice has provided an intimate artery into the Holocaust, a connection with hard-to-grasp numbers. This is a devastating experience.

*

* “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St., (800) 432-7250.