Diary reopened

A less sentimental Anne Frank

by Carolyn Clay

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, By Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman. Directed by James Lapine. Set design by Adrianne Lobel. Costumes by Martin Pakledinaz. Lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Sound by Dan Moses Schreier. With Natalie Portman, George Hearn, Linda Lavin, Harris Yulin, Austin Pendleton, Sophie Hayden, Jonathan Kaplan, Rachel Miner, Philip Goodwin, and Jessica Walling. At the Colonial Theatre through November 16.

As was true 42 years ago, dramatizing Anne Frank's remarkable diary proves both impossible and important. But the new, Broadway-bound revival, which stars 16-year-old film actress Natalie Portman, marks a more muted and less sentimental attempt than the original. Working from Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett's Pulitzer-winning drama and the unexpurgated "definitive edition" of The Diary of a Young Girl, adapter Wendy Kesselman renders a play whose keystone is not the spirited young diarist's faith "that people are really good at heart" but a more heart-rending faith in her own soon-to-be-snuffed potential. "I want to go on living even after my death!" is the fillip of uplift that follows the play's simple, agonized coda, in which the character of Otto Frank reports the fates of his fellow dwellers in "The Secret Annex" (as Anne had planned to call the book she would cull from her diary), closing with the image of Anne being shoveled into a mass grave. It's a powerful, less sugar-coated end to the world-famous story of a caged adolescent batting her dreams against the bars of an Amsterdam attic.

It is interesting that, when The Diary of Anne Frank opened on Broadway in 1955, critic Brooks Atkinson remarked that "nothing momentously dramatic happens. It is a story of stealth, boredom, bickering, searching for comfort in other people, dreams, fears, hunger, anger, and joy." Yet it seems to me that the Hacketts went out of their way to make a little drama of every scene. Of course, this was a year before Broadway was subjected to Waiting for Godot, a masterpiece in which, truly, nothing momentously dramatic happens, yet merciless truths are uttered.

Moreover, Atkinson, in his introduction to the printed play, credits the Hacketts with supplying The Diary with "a beginning, middle, and end." In fact, as critic Cynthia Ozick points out in a recent New Yorker article entitled "Who Owns Anne Frank?", the diary "is not a genial document," and the craftsmanly Hollywood screenwriting couple who adapted it were careful to omit brute reference to its author's end.

For Ozick, to regard The Diary of Anne Frank as "a song to life" is to wallow in a bogus innocence. Yet in many ways, the diary is just that. We can only speculate what would have been reported to "Dearest Kitty" if the journal had accompanied Anne -- who mentions concentration camps as early as July of 1942 -- to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The current revival, though essentially chained to the Hacketts' adaptation (albeit without the frame in which Otto Frank visits Miep Gies and is presented with the diary), strikes an intelligent medium between hope and horror.

Director James Lapine is in uncharacteristic territory in Anne's annex (in Adrianne Lobel's workable setting a drab, gauzy, insular jumble on which bursts of noise, including planes, sirens, and Nazi harangue, intrude). But the frequent Stephen Sondheim collaborator has gathered a capable, non-grandstanding cast who almost race through the work -- as if time, even for these Jews in torturous, tedious hiding, were hurtling by. The Jerusalem-born Portman is a bit nymphetish for Anne Frank. But if she doesn't capture the mercurial intensity of "quicksilver Anne," she does master the exuberant teen's now roiling, now pert, always alert adolescence.

Kesselman, for her part, sticks closer to the diary than the Hacketts did. There is less of a push to make the plight of Anne and her companions "universal" (the main complaint of dueling adapter Meyer Levin, whose more Jewish version of The Diary Boston's Lyric Stage has twice performed). The play has been shortened; there is less incident but more lyricism, mostly in paragraph-long voiceover passages from the diary (the weak link for Portman, who sounds as if she were reciting), including a lovely one in which Anne compares "the eight of us in the Annex" to "a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds" and implores the dark ring to "open wide and let us out!"

In that same passage, Anne writes, "We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other." Indeed, this new production takes Anne in that more tolerant vein toward her co-inhabitants. Material has been inserted with regard to the painful gulf between Anne and her mother (which Otto Frank initially excised from the diary). But the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan and the dentist Dussel, as presented on stage, are vastly less cartoonish and unlikable than heretofore. In fact, Kesselman has added a very tender scene for the quarrelsome Van Daans, after Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread. And veteran actors Harris Yulin and Linda Lavin make the irksome couple human, Yulin supplying the hungry Dutch businessman with a world-weary humor, Lavin girding Mrs. Van D. with a sly if petulant persona that's less overbearing than the one that won Shelley Winters an Oscar.

Similarly, Austin Pendleton makes Dussel more docile and less dictatorial than the usurping roommate Anne describes. The other performances are self-effacing, with George Hearn a stoic, tender Otto Frank; Sophie Hayden his nervous, exhausted wife; Rachel Miner a placid yet kindly Margot; and Jonathan Kaplan a quiet standout as the hunch-shouldered, parentally mortified Peter Van Daan, whose tongue-tied hostility toward Anne turns to awkward, innocent, sex-sparked companionship.

Kesselman has rewritten the final scene in the annex, incorporating an incident from the diary in which imminent liberation seems presaged by the arrival of a large quantity of strawberries. And the interruption of a giddy orgy of hulling and feasting -- rather than of a stormy, anxious confab -- by a gun-toting SS sergeant is both chilling and poignant. Hope in the face of evil will probably always be the emblem of The Diary of Anne Frank. But in this new, less overtly inspirational version of the play, evil -- left to cower in the wings in 1955 -- is at least allowed to take the stage.