Review - Compulsion

The most touching, delicately nuanced and beautifully realized work in The Public Theater's premiere production of Compulsion is, quite honestly, a wooden performance. Rinne Groff's fictionalized tale of the Broadway dramatization of Anne Frank's diary begins with a life-sized marionette depicting the young girl, pencil in hand, innocently writing down thoughts that she most likely never dreamed would be so immortalized. As a voice quotes how the adolescent feels, "in spite of everything," Matt Acheson's creation, manuevered by Emily DeCola, Daniel Fay and Eric Wright, moves with remarkably understated detail, her frozen face and stiff body nevertheless communicating heartbreaking sincerity through Anne Frank's words. Unfortunately the rest of the evening seems freakishly overplayed by comparison.

Mandy Patinkin plays Sid Silver, a character based on the real-life Jewish-American author, Meyer Levin, whose 1956 book about Leopold and Loeb, Compulsion, has been credited with introducing the concept of the non-fiction novel. Like Levin, Groff presents the facts as they are generally known but changes the names of the major players.

Silver/Meyer was one of the first to read Anne Frank's diary and encouraged her father, Otto Frank, to have it published, writing the forward himself as well as a high-profile review in the New York Times which greatly contributed to its best-selling success. Silver, who used to belong to a marionette theatre, insists that Otto Frank fully supports his endevour to dramatize the diaries into a play. An early draft of it is greatly admired when broadcast on a Jewish-themed radio program but Broadway producers reject it in favor of a version penned by It's A Wonderful Life screenwriters, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.

The main issue at hand is Jewishness. Silver insists the diary is an important piece of Jewish literature and that the play must be written by a Jew. Those with more secular interests feel the Jewish aspect of the story should be toned down for the play, giving it a more universal appeal. Though expensive legal battles leave him forbidden to produce his script, for the next thirty years Silver is obsessed with finding critical acceptance that will prove his play, significant aspects of which he says were stolen by the Hackett and Goodrich, is superior to the Tony and Pulitzer-winner, seeing himself as the true messenger of what was in the heart of Anne Frank.

Groff makes it clear in her text that Silver is an intense man who alienates others with explosive outbursts. Patinkin is certainly no stranger to such roles and is known for performances that host a collection of familiar idiosyncracies: the stacatto stammer, the tightly-squinting eyes, the sudden growl of volume, the high-pitched fury, the unintelligibly rapid speech and, in this case, a southern drawl that he speaks with at the beginning of each act but soon fades. In musical theatre, a composer's pitches and rhythms can control these moments, and a fantasy comedy like The Princess Bride can frame them, but from my second row seat the excessively-heightened reality of his performance overwhelmed the rest of the evening. I have no reason to doubt the actor's dedication to presenting a believeable character but by the second act the intensity of his variety of vocals reached farcical levels.

Though Hannah Cabell and Matte Osian don't go as far as their castmate, director Oscar Eustis also has them playing their multiple roles with broad strokes, particularly when Cabell makes Silver's wife a generically lively and thickly-accented French woman and Osian appears as a pretensiously intellectual Israeli theatre artist.

Groff has a good story to work with and delivers ear-catching dialogue. But aside from an episode where Silver's wife envisions Anne Frank as the other woman who shares their marriage bed (Patinkin supplies the marionette's adolescent voice for that scene.) the play's major flaw is that there's no sympathy developed to pull you into the story. The dramatization of Anne Frank's diaries is a beloved contribution to American popular theatre and without some sense of what there is in Silver's script that might contribute more, the evening amounts to little more than enduring the rants of a self-destructive artist who should probably start a new project.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Mandy Patinkin; Bottom: Hannah Cabell and Mandy Patinkin.

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