← BroadwayRadio
BroadwayRadio
All the Drama: “The Diary of Anne Frank”, 1956 Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
00:47:11
All The Drama is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of deep dives into the plays that have won The Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama: “The Diary of Anne Frank“1956 Pulitzer winner “The Diary of Anne Frank”,
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:00]
Narrator
When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Zigly fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and livestreaming to the masses with reliable service. Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime.
- [00:15]
Brad
Let's go.
- [00:16]
Narrator
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without FreeSync. The numbers look good.
- [00:23]
Brad
Brad. You're on mute.
- [00:24]
Narrator
Switch from cable Internet to ziply fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable at ziplyfiber.com packages by Expedia.
- [00:33]
Jan Simpson
You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia made to travel.
- [00:53]
Brad
The year is 1956. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivers a speech denouncing the political purges, deportations of ethnic groups, executions, massacres and other atrocities committed by his predecessor Joseph Stalin. In the US Growing numbers of people are paying attention to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a campaign that has thousands of of that city's black citizens refusing to take public transportation to protest the policy of racial discrimination that forced black people to sit in the back of the bus or give up their seats to white riders. And in that year of 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for drama went to the Diary of Anne Frank, an adaptation of the book by the young Jewish girl whose family hid in an attic for two years before being discovered by the Nazis. And that remains even today, one of the best known, most powerful and yet most controversial stories about the Holocaust. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I was in junior high school when I first read Anne Frank's diary, and like millions of others, I had a visceral response to it. I was too young to see the original production of the play, but I later saw the 1959 movie when it came on TV, and years later I saw the 1997 Broadway revival that starred a 16 year old Natalie Portman. What I didn't know until I began to do the research for this episode is that the story behind the original production is almost as dramatic as the play itself. I learned so much that I can't resist sharing a lot of it with you. As many of you already know, 13 year old Anne Frank wanted to be a writer and her parents gave her a diary shortly before she moved into the cramped annex behind a warehouse near a canal in Amsterdam with her older sister Margot, their parents, Otto and Edith, and the family of Otto's business partner, Herman van Pels, which included his wife and a teenage son named Peter. Anne's diary gave that family the pseudonym of the Van Dans. They were all later joined by a dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, who the diary called Dr. Dussel. Otto was the only one of the eight to survive after they were all sent to concentration camps. Niet Gies, the Dutch woman who helped the families by smuggling in food and other supplies during their time in hiding, saved Anne's writings after the group was arrested, and she gave the diary to Otto when he returned to Amsterdam after the war. It was first published in Dutch in 1947 in an edition of just three 1500 copies with the title the Secret Annex. After being turned down by several US publishers, it was eventually published here in 1952, after Judith Jones, the same editor who discovered Julia Child, plucked the manuscript out of the reject pile at Doubleday and persuaded her bosses to publish it. With the title the Diary of a Young Girl. The book quickly became a bestseller, and it continues to sell. More than 30 million copies have been sold over the past seven decades. In 1950, two, years before the US publication, Meyer Levin, a writer and a fervent Zionist, had read a French translation of the Diary while he was working as a journalist in Paris. And Levin became a fierce advocate for it, reaching out to Otto and advising him on how to get the book to an American audience. And despite his obvious conflict of interest, Levin even somehow got himself the job of reviewing the book for the New York Times. He gave it a rave. The one thing Levin asked in exchange for for all of this was the right to adapt the Diary into a play. Although he'd written a couple of screenplays, Levin hadn't done a play before. So although Otto and the Doubleday folks agreed to give him a crack at it, they also said they'd expect Levin to step aside if a more experienced playwright came along and wanted to do the adaptation. And this is where the story gets complicated. The book's popularity made the theatrical rights a hot property. Cheryl Crawford, a co founder of the Group Theatre and a veteran Broadway producer, expressed an interest in bringing it to the stage. She seemed willing at first to consider Levin's script, but she pretty quickly rejected it. She said that was because it wasn't good enough. He said it was because he had emphasized Ann's Jewishness at a time when so many American Jews were trying to assimilate and fit into the mainstream. Now I need to take a step back here and explain that both Auto Fret and the Doubleday editors had gone out of their way to emphasize the universal nature of Ann's story. Now that's probably so that it would appeal to a wider audience, particularly in an America where Jews accounted for just 3% of the population and were still prohibited from living in certain places or joining certain clubs. And some colleges even had quotas limiting the number of Jewish students they'd accept. Levin's version of the play underscored how similar behaviors in Germany had resulted in the Holocaust. The others involved in the adaptation wanted a more feel good story. Crawford reached out to several other playwrights, including Carson McCullough's, who had scored a recent hit with the adaptation of her novella A Member of the Wedding, John Van Druten, who had just adapted Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera for the Stage, and Ruth Goetz, who had turned the Henry James novella Washington Square into the crowd pleasing drama the Heiress. But for varying reasons they all turned her down. Crawford herself withdrew from the project when Levin threatened to sue, but the producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, stepped in. He had done several successful productions with Lillian Hellman and he tried to get her to take the job. Hellman said no, but she recommended her friends Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The Hacketts, as they were known, were more experienced as screenwriters. Their adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's detective novella the Thin Men had won them an Oscar nomination and set a template for the kind of witty banter that we still expect from those kinds of movies. They also wrote the script for Easter Parade, Father of the bride, seven brides for seven brothers and that 1946 classic it's a Wonderful Life. But the Hacketts did have roots in the theater. Goodrich was born in Belleville, New Jersey, on December 21, 1890, to Madeline Christy Lloyd and her husband, Henry Wicke Goodrich, an attorney who directed amateur plays in his spare time. Their daughter, Frances, graduated from Vassar in 1912 and then went on to attend the New York School of Social Work the next year. But she left before she got her master's degree to become an actress, and she performed on the stage for the next 15 years. Albert Hackett, 10 years younger than Goodrich, was born in New York City on February 16, 1900, to the silent film star Florence Hackett and her husband, Morris. Albert started acting as a child, making his stage debut at the age of six, and he continued acting as an adult too, mostly in comic roles, both on stage and in silent film. But by 1928, both Goodrich and Hackett were tired of performing and were individually nursing dreams of moving into playwriting. And so when she showed him a script she had been working on while both were performing in a summer stock company, he offered to rewrite it with her. Their play, Up Pops the Devil, a comedy about writers in Greenwich Village, opened on Broadway in the fall of 1930 and ran for a then decent 148 performances. The couple married the following year and accepted an offer from MGM to move to Hollywood, where they quickly became one of the most successful screenwriting teams in town. The Diary of Anne Frank was obviously different from the snappy comedies that were their specialty, but as it did for legions of others, it spoke to the Hacketts. So they took a leave of absence from their MGM contract and spent two years working on the script, which not only had to please their producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, but Otto Frank too. And since neither of them were Jewish and they really wanted to do a good job, the Hacketts read books on Jewish history and religion. They met with rabbis to talk about Jewish traditions, especially the Hanukkah service featured in the play. They also met with people who had known the Franks before they went into hiding to get information about the family and about what it was like to have to wear the Star of David as the Nazis had required all Jews to do, and how people got access to fake identity papers and ration cards that were so essential to the Franks survival. According to the biography of the couple written by their nephew, David L. Goodrich, the Hacketts began writing their script on December 15, 1953, and they kept to a strict schedule, beginning around nine in the morning, with an hour off for lunch, and ending the day around 4:30. That allowed them to finish their first rough draft in about five weeks. But that was only the beginning the process. After four more months of rewrites, they shared their fourth completed version of the play with Bloom Garden and their friend Lillian Hellman. Both of them said it didn't work, and Otto Frank said it failed to capture the girl Ann had been. Bloomgarden was so disappointed that he even threatened to pull out of the project completely. So the Hacketts went back to work. The couple sometimes fought over the challenges as they worked, and even when they weren't quarreling, Frances often ended up in tears, overwhelmed by the Frank family's ordeal. Finally, in October 1954, the Hacketts delivered a sixth version that Bloom Garden deemed worthy enough to move ahead, and the script was sent to the director, Garson Kanan. Kanan agreed to join the project, but he had notes, 17 pages of notes. Amazingly, the Hacketts welcomed Kanan's suggestions and incorporated many of them. For example, the play is essentially a collection of vignettes about the family's time in the Annex. And it was Canon who came up with the idea that they should bridge the transition from one scene to another with voiceover excerpts from the diary. And that became sort of a signature hallmark of the play itself. Canon also suggested titles for the play. Among them were the Annex and the Hiding Place, before they all settled on the Diary of Not a Young Girl, as the book had been called, but the Diary of Anne Frank. Kanan also invited the Hacketts to join him in a trip to Amsterdam, where they saw the real Annex and met Otto Frank, who shared additional stories about his family that also helped to inform the play. By the end, the Hacketts wrote eight different complete versions of their play. Now they had to get it on the stage. As always, casting was key. The Viennese born actor Joseph Schilkraut, who bore a really surprisingly striking resemblance to Otto Frank, was signed up early in the process to play Otto. Susan Strasberg, the teenage daughter of the acting coach Lee Strasberg, was an early candidate to play Anne, but others were considered too, including the then 16 year old Natalie Wood. But it was agreed that she didn't have enough stage experience to deliver eight performances a week. Schiltkraut remained a strong champion of Strasberg's and he persuaded the director and writers to see her and audition her again. And this time she clicked with all of them. The rest of the cast included the character actors, Jack Guilford and Lu Jacoby, the young actress Eva Rubenstein, who as a child had fled the Nazis with her father, the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein. And the cast also, most controversially, included Gusti Huber, a Viennese actress who who had worked in German films throughout the war and who some suspected of having had two close ties with the Nazis. The biggest challenge, though, was figuring out what to do with the second act, which everyone agreed lacked tension. Finally, during the show's three week Philadelphia tryout, the Hacketts came up with the idea that the Mr. Van Pels character, who Anne had given the pseudonym Van Dan, would be discovered stealing bread from the group's small rations. An act that unleashes the many frustrations all of them had been feeling and trying to suppress. Although the real life Herman van Pels had complained about the small amounts of food he was getting. There had been no theft and Otto Frank worried that Van Pell's surviving sibling would be upset by seeing him portrayed as a thief. But Otto reluctantly okayed the fabrication when the Hacketts persuaded him that it was good for the drama and that the character's behavior would ultimately be forgiven by the end of the play. The preview audiences and those that have followed over the years love the change. And it stayed. The Diary of Anne Frank opened at the Court Theater, now the James Earl Jones Theater, on October 5, 1955. The reviews were almost universal raves and the production eventually ran for 717 performances. It won that year's Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award, and of course it won the Pulitzer. The other plays in contention for the Pulitzer that year were Inherit the Win, a recreation of the era surrounding teaching evolution in public school classrooms, and the Time Limit, a drama about an American soldier accused of collaborating with the North Koreans while he was held in a POW camp. The two man Pulitzer jury acknowledged that unlike the other two plays, the Diary of Anne Frank did not deal with the awards stated preference for shows about American life. But they insisted that it was, quote, in every way the best play of the present season. End quote. Meyer Levin didn't think so. He remained outraged. He hated the speech the Hacketts created for Ann to say about how throughout history all kinds of people had suffered because he felt it diminished the Nazis clear intent to exterminate the Jews solely because they were Jews. And even though it was taken from the diary, the play's most famous line, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart, really annoyed Levin because he felt it excused the the people who had allowed the Nazis to proceed with their evil deeds. Levin not only went ahead with his suit against the producers, charging that the Hacketts had plagiarized his work, but he sued Otto Frank too, claiming that Otto had violated their agreement that Levin would be able to write the play. The suits were eventually settled with Levin being paid about $50,000. But in 1973, Levin published a book about the case that he called the obsession. And in 2011, the playwright Rennie Groff adapted his story into a play called Compulsion that played at the Public Theater with Mandy Patinkin as Levin. But back in the 1950s, productions of the Diary of Anne Frank were quickly mounted all over the world. Germans were particularly moved by it. The play was performed in dozens of cities across that country and it was almost always Greeted with penitent and remorseful silence. Of course, a movie was inevitable. Strasberg was now considered too old to play a 15 year old. Even so, the director, George Stevens, was hoping that he could get Audrey Hepburn to play the role. But the actress, who was closing in on 30, turned it down. The part eventually went to an 18 year old Hepburn lookalike named Millie Perkins. The film, which came out in 1959 and amped up the romance between Anne and Peter, was nominated for eight Oscars and won three, including one for Shelley Winters, who took over the role of the prickly Mrs. Van Damme that the controversial Gusty Hoover had played on stage. But the winning movie that year was Ben Hur, which ended up taking home over 10 Oscars. The diary of Anne Frank marked the apogee of the Hacketts career. They were offered all kinds of projects after that movie's success, and they tried their hands at a few. Their final movie turned out to be five finger exercise, a 1962 Rosalind Russell vehicle that one critic called All Thumbs. After that, the Hacketts basically retired, except when asked to tweak their diary script for the various TV versions of the play that were done over the years. They had a long retirement. Goodrich died of lung cancer in 1984 at the age of 93. Hackett died from pneumonia in 1995, when he was 95. Otto Frank had died in 1980 at the age of 91, never having seen the play because it was too painful for him. He left his entire estate, including the copyright to the diary, to the Anne Frank foundation, which operates the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and advocate against antisemitism and racism. Meyer levin died in 1981 at the age of 75. And of course, Ann died 80 years ago from typhus in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Had she survived, she might have celebrated her 96th birthday this month. But versions of Ann's story continue to be told. In 1985, a musical version called Yours Anne opened off Broadway, although the New York Times critic Frank Rich dismissed it as pious and consistently inert. Playwright Wendy Kesselman revised the Goodrich Hackett script for the 1997 revival. She increased the Jewish references that Meyer Levin had championed. And she added a greater sense of. Of the constant anxiety the families must have experienced as they became more and more aware of the Nazi atrocities going on outside their hiding place and the fear that they too would become victims of it, as of course, eventually happened. A graphic novel of the Diary was published in 2018 and a picture book version for Grade schoolers called Anne Frank a Kid's Book about Hope was released in 2021. Around 1 million people still visit the Anne Frank House every year. And last month I visited a replica of the annex that is the main feature of the Anne Frank exhibit that is at Manhattan's center for Jewish History through October. I do a lot of research for these episodes, but I'm a piker compared to Adam Langer, the executive editor of The Forward, the 128-year-old newspaper that used to be known as the Jewish Daily Forward. Two years ago, Adam released a superb seven part podcast series on the play and its after effect on the people who made and appeared in it over the last 80 years. So I was so pleased and grateful when he agreed to talk with me even more about it. Hello, Adam Langer, welcome to all the drama.
- [27:51]
Jan Simpson
Thank you for having me. A pleasure to speak with you on this lovely, though humid afternoon in New York City.
- [27:59]
Brad
Before we start talking about the play, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how you first encountered Anne Frank's story.
- [28:10]
Jan Simpson
You know, that's one of the most easy questions to answer and one of the most difficult because it's one of those books that almost seems part of the collective unconsciousness. I almost don't remember a time when I remember having not read it. I assume that the actual answer to that question is that when I was in middle school in Chicago, we had this little library in our school and there was a sustained silent reading period where you could pick something off the shelf and. And that was one of the books on the shelf and that was the first time I read it. But it seems like the answer to that question is not quite as profound as the real answer because it's something that I feel like I've always known. It's always been there and I just can't remember not having read it, even though I assumed before that time I had not.
- [29:10]
Brad
I assume you've seen the play. Of course, sometimes people have not seen the place that we talk about on the episodes.
- [29:20]
Jan Simpson
This is true. But I remember high school productions of it. In addition to the high school production, there was of course the film starring Millie Perkins. There was also the Broadway production that changed it somewhat, that was directed by James Lapine, that featured Natalie Cortman. I did not see that actually on Broadway, though I have gone to the Library of Performing Arts to watch it from their video archive. So there are a number of productions of the show that I've seen over the years.
- [29:49]
Brad
Do you have a favorite production Or a, you know, favorite approach or favorite variation of it. It could even be that high school production.
- [30:00]
Jan Simpson
You know, I would say two things to that. The best production is the one that exists in my mind after just having read it, just kind of just imagining it for yourself. And the best production, I feel, is the one I did not see, which, if we can talk about it, was the original Broadway production that I spent a great deal of time researching it, because to see the play itself is one thing, but to see it in that post war period, maybe just 10 years after World War II had ended, when people not only did not know the story of Anne Frank, they did not know really everything that had happened in the war. And this was for many people in the audience, their first exposure to a story like that of Anne Frank. So to imagine oneself in that theater, the Cork Theater in 1955 or 56, where it ran for 700 some odd performances, that's something is almost more powerful to me, the imagination of that production than like any physical production that I had seen. So, you know, I. I have seen actors performing these roles, but in my imagination, the most powerful one was the one that was on Broadway and won the Tony Award in the Pulitzer Prize and just stunned audiences to the extent that when the show was over, they didn't even know whether to applaud. They didn't know what to do because they hadn't. They didn't know that story. And it seemed strange to applaud and it seemed strange to have any other reaction, but just kind of to stay in a stunned silence in community, having experienced this play.
- [31:51]
Brad
Then that leads me to the question I always ask in these episodes why you think the Pulitzer board awarded its prize to this play. And particularly because, as I'm sure you know, the Pulitzer is supposed to celebrate a play about American life, and this is not a play about American life. So why do you think that they sort of overrode that and decided to award it to this play?
- [32:26]
Jan Simpson
Well, in some ways, if you look at the list of plays that have won the Pulitzer Prize, in many ways, it's almost not enough to just have written a great play. In some cases, that is sufficient. But what really kind of seems to me that feels, whether it's in journalism, whether it's in theater, whether it's in something else, is something that actually changes history or changes a national conversation. And I think that's very much what Anne Frank did when it premiered on Broadway, because, you know, in schools now we have all the, perhaps in the current environment, less so, but there used to be this thing up until around perhaps a few months ago called Holocaust Education where students will read the Diary of Anne Frank, they will visit a Holocaust museum, they will talk to a survivor or the descendant of a survivor, they will write papers about it. But before the Diary of Anne Frank, Holocaust education as we know it now did not exist. This was the earliest form of Holocaust education in America was people being on this, this play, people seeing it on Broadway, people seeing it when it went on the road touring more than 100 cities across America, bringing the play to places that not only didn't necessarily know about the Holocaust, but maybe never even had had a Jewish person in their midst. This really opened the eyes of ordinary American citizens all around the country. It was more than just a play. It was an education for the citizens of America. And I think in, you know, I don't know who was sitting on the appeals report that year. I don't know why they chose Anne Frank as opposed to Inherit the Wind, which was also in the running and also had a profound things to say about American society. But I think the fact that it changed how American viewed the war experience, the Jewish experience, the way it opened people's eyes to this one person story, I think may say a lot about why the Tulitzer Prize committee did decide to make that decision that year.
- [34:44]
Brad
It's interesting that you say change the conversation because at the time there was a lot of overt antisemitism here in the us There were still restricted places where, where Jews weren't welcome. There were still quotas in some colleges. So do you think it began to force people to confront their own prejudices?
- [35:14]
Jan Simpson
I mean, one certainly would hope, though I don't want to say that, you know, Anne Frank premiered on Broadway in 1955, went on the road in the late 50s, became a movie in 1959, and then miraculously, anti Semitism was gone. And I mean, quotas still existed, whether on paper or they were unspoken. Antisemitism is very much still a thing right now. But I do think it did perhaps change the minds of some people who saw it, who thought differently. I don't want to say that it had the impact that many of the people who were involved with Depression would have liked it to have. But in terms of being a step toward progress, a step towards speaking out against bigotry. And one of the things I discovered while researching the cast of Anne Frank, the original Broadway production, the one that went on the Road, was how profoundly it changed the lives of the people who were in it for them. It wasn't just another play. It changed the trajectory of their lives. People who were actors, actresses exploring roles on Broadway, you know, someone did do social work, someone did psychology. There was the actor who played the role of Peter Van Dam in the film, Richard Beamer, who you would probably know also from having played Tony in West side Story. After Anne Frank, he became a documentary still maker. He went down south to fight for civil rights. The documentary he made about the civil rights in Mississippi ended with a line from the Diary of Anne Frank. It impacted him so profoundly. So to have one play, any play, no matter what it is, change an entire national conversation. Yeah, it's not so much, but in order to maybe start shifting the conversation and moving it in a different direction, I think Anne Frank played a role in that.
- [37:21]
Brad
What made you decide to dig deeper into, into the history of the play and do a whole podcast series about it, which I really strongly recommend that everybody listen to. It's a terrific series. Why did you decide to go deeper?
- [37:42]
Jan Simpson
Well, mainly all my projects, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, start with just a question. A couple years ago, I came out with a novel that was published by Bloomsbury. It was called Cyclorama. It was about the cast of a high school production of the Diary in the early 1980s and how this production, which was sort of an ill fated production, went on to change the lives of everyone who was in it, whether it be the director or the set designer and all the 10 cast members of the show. So that novel starts in 1982 and then picks up their lives during the the first Trump administration and shows how this one show changed the trajectories of their lives. And when I was more or less done with the novel, I was curious about whether I was right. My sense was that appearing in the Diary of Anne Frank would be different than doing, you know, any of a number of other chestnuts that are popular high school shows, say Our Town or Midsummer Night's Dream. I thought that playing these roles and living the life of the characters who are confined during the time of the Holocaust, living in this secret annex in Amsterdam, I thought that playing that role would be something you wouldn't be able to escape that easily. So I went out to find the members of the original cast and ask them, how did it change you to talk to the people who went on the road for 101, however many cities and however many performances to take Diary Van Frank across America? And I talked to kids who were just playing Anne Frank. In high schools across America just a year ago, because I wanted to know, is it true? Am I right? How did it affect people? So, you know, the show was almost 70 years ago now and it appeared on Broadway. But a lot of the people in it were very, very young at the time and they were still around. And so I talked to them and asked me to tell them their stories. Sometimes I talked to the people who were children of the people who had been in the shows. I talked to an actor named David Levin who originated the role of Peter Van Dam on Broadway. And it affected him so profoundly he gave a TV directed later, but it affected him so profoundly that he changed his name from David to Peter as a tribute to the character he had played on Broadway. That's how it started. I wrote a book. I was interested in the Diary of Anne Frank. But, you know, fiction only takes you so far. And you want, you know, I'm a journalist and I wanted to fact check myself and talk to these people. And more people I talked to, the more I wanted to talk to more people who had been in it and just hearing their stories of what it was like to play these roles and. And what it was like to commune with the audience.
- [40:40]
Brad
It's funny, like the 1997 revival was. I guess you might even call it a revisal.
- [40:51]
Jan Simpson
You know, I mean, I've read it, I've seen the video of it. But I, you know, when I was researching, I was very much focused on the original production that was written by Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich. You know, it was interesting that they chose those two writers who were basically Hollywood writers. They wrote It's a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart, and they weren't Jewish either. And that was actually kind of part of the plan. They wanted this show to be something that would appeal beyond a Jewish audience too. Like the sort of audience that Michael out and see a Frank Capra movie starring Jimmy Stewart. But you were asking me about 1997. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to answer, but I can try.
- [41:38]
Brad
What I was going to ask is that the original production and you were going down that road sort of emphasized the universal nature of Anne's story. And for some people, that was controversial. There was a feeling that it had downplayed her Jewishness and that the 1997 revival restored that sense of the persecution of the Jews, the more front and center the horrors of the Holocaust. Even though most of the story, right up until the end, takes place in the annex in the hiding places. And I was just wondering about your thoughts in that whole controversy.
- [42:30]
Jan Simpson
Well, I mean, the 1997 production wasn't the most Jewish Diary of Anne Frank play that was ever written. That was the one that was written actually before the Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich production. And what was supposed to be the original Broadway show was written by the Jewish author Meyer Levin, who was most famous for doing the play and film Compulsion, starring Orson Welles, about the Leopold Loeb murders. And Levin wanted to really emphasize Anne Frank's Jewishness, the particularity of her story. And you can listen, you can find. They're on my podcast, but you can also just find them online. You can find the original radio play that Meyer Levin wrote, and you can see what he means. But you could also see why the producers of the play didn't want it, not only because necessarily, it was more Jewish, but it was much more didactic and teacherly and less universally theatrical, which is why I imagine that he ultimately didn't get the job. And it went to these two Hollywood veterans who could tell a story that could appeal to a broader swath of America. Now, you know, with my 2025 hindsight, do I find it a little bit patronizing or slightly offensive that people felt they had to perhaps water down Anne Frank's Jewishness in order to tell a more universal story? Perhaps. But at the same time, you can't really argue with the success of what they did and how it did change people and how it did move people. So, you know, I wasn't there in 1950. It's very easy for me to say that it was patronizing of the producers and the writers to do this, but by the same token, I like you, can't really argue with the success of it and the impact that it had. So, you know, and Even now, the 1997 version is not necessarily what you're getting to see, even when high schools produce the show. Sometimes it is, but not necessarily.
- [44:59]
Brad
We've been talking about the play in the past, which makes sense. But the end of your podcast series ends with your conversations with a lot of young actors who are doing it now. And I'm just wondering, why do you think 70 years, maybe even more later, why does the play continue to resonate with audiences and with young people today?
- [45:32]
Jan Simpson
I mean, I think, you know, we can talk about the history of it. We can talk about the history of prejudice. We can talk about how useful it is as a teaching tool, how it personalized an aspect of history. But I think it really comes down to voice and some of the greatest works of the literature, the ones that endure are the ones with the voices that can speak to you across generations. And that's not just stories about the Holocaust. That's David Copperfield, that, Catcher in the Rye. These voices that for whatever reason, the author has been able to reach across and convey a certain authenticity which people can recognize as genuine and also recognize as something within themselves. And there's a certain magic and a certain alchemy to that. And Anne Frank's writing and her character and her story and her experience has that power. And that's why the play endures, and that's why the diary endures and is, as people will quote you over and over, second most read story after the Bible. Third most. One of the. One of the. One of them up there, anyway. And I think it's the honesty and the beauty of the writing and the voice that continues to speak to us and continues to move people, whether they're in the audience or whether they're up there on stage.
- [47:13]
Brad
Well, thank you for looking back at it with us and for being so thoughtful about why the play continues to resonate. Thank you very much for doing this.
- [47:28]
Jan Simpson
Of course. I appreciate it. Happy to talk anytime, and I wish you the best of luck with this podcast. I look forward to listening to all the episodes.
- [47:36]
Brad
Thanks, and thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me at jan at breadwoodradio. Com.