Rinne Groff takes us to the intersection of history and show business in her very powerful new play, “Compulsion,” which is getting its world premiere production at Yale Repertory Theatre.
The show opened to the press Thursday night and will be running through Feb. 28.
Groff tells the little-known story of the wrangling over the dramatization of the diary of Anne Frank after the book became a huge best-seller.
Author Meyer Levin — whose popular books included “Compulsion,” about the 1920s era thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb —played a key role in launching the diary in this country.
Frank’s journal was published in Europe in the late 1940s but there was little interest in the book here until Levin — with the support of Anne’s father Otto — pushed Doubleday.
Levin wanted to write the introduction, but the publisher lined up Eleanor Roosevelt instead in the hopes of broadening the audience beyond a Jewish readership.
Doubleday arranged for Levin to review the book on the cover of The New 
York Times Book Review — despite the fact that he had a personal interest in the material — and that rave helped the diary become a major U.S. best-seller.
That’s when the trouble started for Levin as his plans to write the play were undercut by Doubleday and Otto Frank — who wanted a bigger name involved and also wanted to lessen the “ethnic” aspects of the story.
In the play Levin is called Sid Silver and he is being given vivid life in New Haven by Mandy Patinkin (left), who captures both the rage and the despair of an artist who is denied the project he believes would be the summation of his career and his life as a proud Jew.
When he was young, Levin ran a marionette theater in Chicago and Groff uses that fact for the daring device of having Anne Frank portrayed as a puppet. Marionettes are also used for re-enactments of scenes from the eventual hit Broadway version of the book.
Director Oskar Eustis does a great job of mixing the hyper-realism of the scenes set in the New York City literary and Broadway worlds of the 1950s with the surreal elements dealing with history and myth supplied by the marionettes.
Hannah Cabell (below) contributes excellent work in two roles — as Levin’s French wife and as Miss Mermin, the writer’s ally-turned-nemesis at Doubleday.
Stephen Barker Turner plays all of the other male roles in the show and is especially good in Act Two (above) as an Israeli director who wants to stage Levin’s script a decade after the Broadway production and the subsequent George Stevens film version.
“Compulsion” is a rich mix of history, entertainment world gossip, and a man’s obsession over a work of art that doesn’t really belong to him. It’s a terrific show that that is already set to move to the Berkeley Rep in California and then the Public Theater in Manhattan.
For ticket information, visit www.yalerep.org
