The Nan Who Was Thursday & The Diary of Anne Frank
Wren, Celia
few months ago, two a shrewd ballet companies co-produced a dance version of Dracuta. The success of the vampire ballet is a curious--not to say monstrous--instance of a story sliding out of...
...recently performed an Uncle Tom's Cabin that both interpreted and commented upon portions of several different scripts, while lampooning dramatic traditions...
...Playwrights and theatrical producers also scrounge from other genres...
...The success of the vampire ballet is a curious--not to say monstrous--instance of a story sliding out of one artistic cubbyhole into another: changing genres...
...Popular culture churns out examples of the same phenomenon...
...Such an integrating approach recently drew acclaim for the staging of another book with a troubled past: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin...
...The spectacle provided a striking reminder of the dangers involved in shuffling stories from genre to genre--and not just stories set in Transylvania...
...Summing up such weighty issues, Oziek wondered whether it would have been better for humanity had Anne's diary never been found...
...Ozick and other critics have faulted the play for inappropriate sunniness, and certainly this Anne Frank abounds in humor and charm...
...While addressing other flaws critics detect in the original Goodrich/Hackett version, the new rendition adds a final note detailing the fates of Anne (who died in the BergenBelsen concentration camp) and the other residents of the attic...
...Cinema engenders television shows, and vice versa...
...Theatergoers who attend one of the season's most conspicuous productions-another play derived from a long prose text--may find controversy clouding the horizon...
...Viewers made too uneasy, by Ozick and other commentators, to enjoy this watchable production's wry portraits of fidgety human beings, may wish the director, James Lapine, had been able to synthesize forty years of mixed feelings about the play, Anne Frank...
...Last year, a run-down Times Square theater housed a dramatic interpretation of T. S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland...
...Knowing what to expect from each genre, the audience is able to orient itself...
...Phantasmagoric escapades proliferate, and police pursuit collides with the carnivalesque nature of the universe...
...readers should not expect too much logic...
...This classic novel may be the most oft-adapted book in American theatrical history, and many a Stowe-inspired raise en scone has been prejudiced, patronizing, and vulgar...
...iterary critics who try to pin down definitions of genre sometimes refer to a "horizon of expectaLions"--as if literary forms present contrasting landscapes for exploration...
...This metaphysical thriller spirals out madly from a marvelous premise: a London counterintelligence chief has formed a corps of "policemen who are also philosophers...
...Book and play seemed to take two paths to--essentially--the same end...
...In the silence that concludes the final scene, the lights dim, and lines of cursive begin to glow across the cutaway levels of the set...
...The performers' dancelike movements--jogging in place, or swaying as if buffeted by a slow-motion gale--steered the scenes away from naturalism, as did sets and props as primitive as a white scarf representing a snowstorm...
...movie heroes wend their way through the liq uid crystal of a video game...
...Even more impressive is the considerable success of director Mark Sussman, movement director Clarinda MacLow, and colleagues, in approximating, with the aid of scenic projections and a few wigs and masks, the novel's atmosphere of hallucinatory suspense...
...we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists...
...In fact, the play version of The Man Who Was Thursday reflected the book's exuberant vision much as a shadow" puppet pageant resembles the threedimensional world: oversimplification, and a touch of awkwardness, did not compromise the similarity of contour...
...The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed...
...The daring of the theatrical troupe, Great Small Works, in staging this madcap romp, is itself admirable...
...In a 1936 newspaper column, Chesterton chided readers who detected in The Man Who Was Thursday a clear-cut allegory about God and man...
...The revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, starring the sixteen-yearold film actress Natalie Portman, has been the focus of some debate, as the script itself has been, in fact, ever since its conception...
...Recently, several New York productions have cast light on what it means for a play to be t r u e - - i n mood and message~to the book it is based on...
...The play delivers us, finally, to the original text--the cramped letters of a young girl's script...
...More audaciously fantastic, however, is his 1908 caper The Man I'~77o Iambs Thursday, which shares the Father Brown series's emphasis on "mystery" in its broadest sense...
...And a fleeting New York musical titled Clue took its inspiration-yes from the board game...
...Last October, a provocative New Yorker article by the writer Cynthia Ozick traced the play's trouCommonweal | 3 March 13, 1998 bled genesis, and related it to what Ozick unflatteringly dubbed the "Anne Frank industry...
...Commonweal | 4 March 13, 1998...
...a book by Jane Austen or Henry James shoots up through the best-seller lists, fueled by box-office adrenaline...
...Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard appropriated the plot and characters of a classic film...
...Ozick's article relates how numerous critics, beginning in the 1950s, have damned the script penned by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the married playwrighting team endorsed by Anne's father, Otto Frank...
...Shadow puppets (created by Stephen Kaplin) neatly met one of the challenges the adaptors faced: representing the anarchist council's demoniacal president, Sunday...
...G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), is probably best known for the stories featuring the sage detective Father Brown...
...We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed....We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.'" Soon after joining these vigilantes, Syme stumbles upon an anarchist conspiracy to destroy civilization and morality itself...
...Audiences found themselves confronting a century's worth of adaptors' blunders and travesties, as actors playing Little Eva or Topsy exaggerated the worst mannerisms of farce, minstrel shows, melodrama, and other historical styles...
...Van Daan, gives many of the early scenes, especially, a comic bounce...
...But a more common alchemy, of course, translates a full-length book to the stage, inviting well-read viewers to decide whether the drama is faithful to the original text...
...Despite rather naive acting, and the unnecessary interpolation into the script of texts by Jean Genet, Emma Goldman, and others, the recent production did capture the flavor of nightmare...
...A particularly interesting adaptation, on an intimate scale, flourished briefly at the avant-garde forum P. S. 122...
...A dynamic young company called the Drama Dept...
...The book is subtitled "A Nightmare," he pointed out...
...An initiate tells the book's hero Gabriel Syme: "'The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves...
...On her stomach on the floor, kicking her heels, or scampering about the kitchen, Portman makes an engaging Anne...
...And Linda Lavin, as the snooty Mrs...
...But there are also moments of desoIation in this production, which uses a revised version of the play, adapted by Wendy Kesselman...
...Detractors have charged that the play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, downplays Jewish themes, avoids issues of moral responsibility, and replaces anguish with feel-good optimism, turning Anne from a real, suffering person into a spurious symbol of the triumphant human spirit...
...With such obloquy as prologue, the current revival's many virtues--its buoyancy, its smooth and thrilling shifts in mood, its winning performances--may seem suspect...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
