I was really looking forward to seeing Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of Compulsion, starring Broadway legend Mandy Patinkin. Unfortunately, while Compulsion is a complex and thought-provoking drama, it was an overall disappointment. Staged with a combination of actors and marionettes, the brief forays into surrealism detracted from the story that was being told. I left the theater puzzled, with the overall impression that it was just a little too weird for my taste.
The play was inspired by the lives of Anne Frank and Meyer Levin, the man who helped to make her diary a bestseller and who became obsessed with becoming the writer to create the stage play of her work. It speaks to the very nature of how individuals and societies view their heroes, or in this case, heroines, and also to the complex processes involved in writing, the publishing business and playwriting. Ultimately, it questions what is the measure of a man’s success, as we witness a career that was derailed by paranoia, an overwhelming sense of religious persecution, bad business sense, and the inability to let go.
Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion (© Joan Marcus)
In this play, Meyer Levin is represented by one of his characters, Sid Silver (Mandy Patinkin). Sid was a novelist and war correspondent who covered the liberation of the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. As an outsider, Sid was convinced that he could not convey the magnitude of the horrors inflicted in the concentration camps, but hoped that a ‘teller’ – someone who lived and wrote from inside the camp, would. That person was Anne Frank.
Sid’s wife, Tereska, introduced him to a French version of the diary in 1950. Sid was so moved, and impressed by Anne’s writing, that he contacted Otto Frank and was an integral part of bringing the diary to the attention of Doubleday, to be published as a novel. He was asked to write the New York Times review of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and that review helped to catapult the book to bestseller status. Sid also spoke to Otto about adapting the diary into a play, and with a verbal agreement, started working on the project.
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