THEATER: A DARKER ANNE FRANK

It is one of the most famous, and oddest, closing lines of any American play. “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” the doomed heroine says at the end of The Diary of Anne Frank. The words, taken from the real Anne’s journal, were designed to give Broadway audiences an uplifting scoot out the door, a parting affirmation of the human spirit. But it worked only if you didn’t think too hard about what happened to the characters in real life. Anne and the seven family members and friends who spent two years hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex above an Amsterdam warehouse were herded off to concentration camps, where all but one of them–Anne’s father Otto–perished.

In a newly revised version of the play that opened last week on Broadway, the line is no longer the drama’s capper. It is spoken in voice-over by Anne just as she and her family are being seized by the Nazis. The juxtaposition is ironic, ambiguous, chilling. Nor does the rewritten last scene offer any reassurance. Otto Frank, revisiting their hiding place after the war, describes the final sighting of Anne in Bergen-Belsen: “Anne’s friend Hanneli sees Anne through the barbed wire, naked, her head shaved, covered with lice. ‘I don’t have anyone anymore,’ she weeps. A few days later Anne dies.”

It’s rare to see such tampering with a beloved classic–a play that won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony in 1956 and was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1959. But The Diary of Anne Frank has never been an ordinary work of literature; more like a communal rite of grief. The journal has probably conveyed the horror of the Holocaust more personally to more people than any other document. Yet some scholars have objected that popularizers of the diary have sanitized its content and distorted its message.

The first and most widely read edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (edited by Otto Frank and published in 1947) omitted a good deal of material that her father deemed unsuitable, from Anne’s criticisms of her mother to her musings about sex. The Broadway play, written by the husband-wife screenwriting team of Albert Hackett and Frances Gooodrich (It’s a Wonderful Life), prettied up the diary even more, downplaying specifics of Nazi crimes against the Jews and recasting the story as a universal tale of suffering and hope. The Hackett-Goodrich version supplanted an earlier, more faithful adaptation written by Jewish novelist Meyer Levin, which was rejected as not commercial enough.

“Almost every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history,” charged novelist Cynthia Ozick in a recent New Yorker article in which she claimed the diary has been “falsified, kitschified and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” Ralph Melnick, author of The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, contends that the play so carefully avoids the particulars of the Jews’ plight under Hitler that it almost becomes “a drama of people who were suffering through a housing shortage.”

The new version tries to address these concerns. Playwright Wendy Kesselman (My Sister in This House) has done a thorough reworking, including material from the expanded edition of the diary published in 1991 (with most of the material restored that Frank had deleted), adding more Jewish references (a Hanukkah song is sung in Hebrew) and in general giving the play a less sentimental, more astringent tone. “I thought it was crucial to bring out the darker side,” says Kesselman.

Directed with a delicate hand by James Lapine, the new version is underplayed, almost muted, yet gripping in its down-to-earth immediacy. Perhaps because Natalie Portman’s Anne is a little short on stage charisma, the story shifts slightly away from her and more toward the complex ensemble of people coping with their terror and with one another. George Hearn as Otto Frank has a hushed dignity; the Van Daans (Harris Yulin and Linda Lavin) seem less foolish and more touching than before. The play was a professional Broadway job to begin with; now it sometimes reaches poetry.

Will the play’s detractors be satisfied? Ozick hasn’t seen this version but is hopeful that the changes will remedy a play that has been “deeply damaging to the world’s psyche” because it found rays of light in a historical event that offers “only darkness.” Melnick, who has seen it, finds the new version better but still historically flawed. (The staging of the Franks’ arrest, he points out, was more factually accurate in the old version.) The rest of us can simply appreciate that a Broadway drama still has the power to move us, and to cause a stir.