The current Broadway dramatization of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl recalls the fact that COMMENTARY was the first to bring the Diary to English-speaking readers, publishing extensive excerpts from it in the issues of May and June 1952.

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Those of us who have read and loved Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl might well be interested in the production currently enjoying success at the Cort Theater in an adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett called simply The Diary of Anne Frank. One knows beforehand that to translate such a work into drama is an impossible task for anyone but a Chekhov, and particularly for the caliber of playwrights who address themselves to the business of “adapting” these days. But at 8:40 P.M. there is a magic of expectation that puts one in a generous frame of mind, and creates the hope that the failure about to be witnessed will at least be an honorable attempt. And when the theater darkens, the hush falls, and the velvet curtain rises slowly on the dimly lit interior we recognize as the “Secret Annex,” all is well, because the set, ingeniously compact, is faithful to our impression of the cramped and shabby quarters which the diary describes. Immediately familiar, nostalgic, and poignant, we believe in it.

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The play begins rather well. The war is over; Anne’s father shuffles up the stairs and enters the disordered hiding place for the first time since he and his family were discovered in it by the Grüne Polizei and sent to concentration camps. All have since perished save himself, and he drifts about the old room like a forlorn apparition, picking up wisps of things as if they were memories he cannot remember well enough, can’t really touch, yet which prick at his feelings like darning needles at tatters. It has something of the atmosphere of the last scene of Our Town about it, when the spirit of Emily returns to the scenes of her youth and is overwhelmed by a sense of never having held life close enough. Here, the living Mr. Frank comes back to a room full of ghosts, the elusive spirits of his beloved family, who carry brief whiffs of recent life to his nostrils, and leave him torn between the pain of remembering them too well, and the pain of realizing how utterly alone he is. He peers about, dazedly intent, as if half expecting them to materialize. Perhaps for a moment they do, for suddenly he sinks down in a paroxysm of pathetic little sobs. Not a word has been spoken, but these are the best moments of the play; the kind of experience that Mr. Frank survived has been simply and movingly suggested.

Abruptly the spell is broken. The Dutch friend who had helped hide the family, Miep, invades the scene, pregnant (life goes on), practical (you’re not leaving, Mr. Frank, this is your business), and speaking in the pedestrian tones of a sensible young American housewife. She produces Anne’s diary, gives it to Mr. Frank, and he begins to read it aloud—almost without batting an eyelash, without having properly established a mood for the reading of the diary, or the effect that reading it for the first time would have upon Anne’s father.

Then the voice of a girl fades in and takes over the passages of narration which bridge the transitions from scene to scene throughout the play. It is a lovely voice—young and resonant and full of the energy of good will and the desire to be loved by her audience. But it is not long before the listener becomes aware of an inadequacy: it is the voice of a girl who has never really listened to the inner voice of Anne Frank, which is the true voice of the diary. It is a voice that, like the stock dove of Wordsworth’s poem, seems to listen only to itself. It is without the nuance, the quick intelligence, even without the volatility by which we would recognize its prototype. It rises and falls in set cadence, like waves lapping a shore, and toward the end of the play it has taken on a kind of pseudo-caesural pause in the middle of almost every line—intended, I imagine, to convey Anne’s having grown up a bit more, having suffered the pangs of falling in love, and having begun to think. The Anne of this play, however, has not actually undergone any of these experiences, at least in the way that the real Anne Frank did, so that these incoherent halts serve only to heighten the effect of superficiality and inarticulateness that renders the script so poor, does pitiful injustice to the diary, and proves too much even for those of the actors who try to make up for it.

For the bulk of the play, this is the Anne Frank who takes over; seldom do we glimpse the Anne Frank of the real diary. There is, for example, an incident in the first act which quite subverts the real Anne’s healthy, sturdy nature. When the occupants of the Secret Annex are seized with panic because of sudden loud noises coming from the landing just beyond their secret door, Anne faints dead away. The Anne of the diary did not faint. There is an entry on October 20,1942, which speaks of having “nearly fainted,” and Anne experienced, throughout her sequestration, many moments of fear, terror, and shock much worse than this one—but she does not ever faint. It is rather important, I think, that seemingly small facts like this should not be violated for the sake of a dramatic situation which would be quite dramatic enough without such extremities of response. Not that Anne was self-sufficient and contained as regards the frightening realities of hiding for two years under the very nose of the Gestapo, but neither was she hysterical about them. That quality of response belongs rather to Mrs. Van Daan, as Anne’s diary so thoroughly bears out.

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The most seriously dishonest section of the play, however, and the one which I think is the crux of its failure, is that which attempts to dramatize Anne’s romance with Peter Van Daan. I could not recognize a jot of truth in it. In this scene, Anne is revealed in her small bedroom at stage right wearing a white eyelet-embroidered petticoat and chemise. She is, according to local parlance, “getting all gussied up” to visit Peter, who is waiting restlessly in his small garret on the other side of the stage. As the dialogue proceeds, Anne sweeps her long hair up into a psyche-bun and impulsively tries on her sister’s pink lace brassiere, stroking the firmness of her round young breasts as she does so. Then she dons a soft pastel skirt and décolleté blouse of charming simplicity, petit-Louis pumps, and, for the finishing touch, a lengthy knitted stole of soft wool. Before emerging from her room she pauses on the threshhold and says to her sister, “Well, here I go to ‘run the gamut’!” Then out she glides, stately as a debutante, through the room where the parents and Mr. Dussel sit, to Peter’s door, aloof to the presence of everyone. Peter shows her in and there ensues a conversation between the young lovers that quivers with demure restraint and produces an abundance of the caesural pauses elsewhere described.

The conversation, let alone the manner in which it is carried on, has virtually nothing to do with Anne Frank—nor for that matter with Peter Van Daan. The Anne of this scene, for example, hesitatingly asks Peter if he has ever kissed a girl, to which he replies yes, to which she inquires if she was very pretty, and so on in the vein of one of the stock versions of the adolescent; and after a strained little ceremony of saying good night to each other, they suddenly turn back and fall into each other’s arms in an ardent, innocent embrace. Then, when the door closes on Peter’s room, and Anne stands outside it, presumably with rapidly beating heart, she does a curious and uncharacteristic thing: she lifts her dangling stole and tosses it cavalierly over one shoulder, as if to say, “Ah, now! am a woman of the world!” and as if, too, in secret jest of all that has taken place. It is true that the Anne of the diary once or twice speaks of Peter as her “conquest,” but this is never for a moment meant in the sense of a coy spoof, or for the purposes of striking a pose, or as an innuendo suggesting any fundamental lack of earnestness and directness about their relationship. The real Anne Frank would never, at such a moment, have performed this flippant little antic. The audience, I must report, was greatly amused by it.

But if this were not enough, Anne then goes through the extraordinary business of languidly kissing each member of the household good night, hovering over them gently and lovingly as she does so, and imparting to her audience the age-old truth (undiscovered until our century) that a little love is a wonderful thing. With this she floats into her room, and the wholesome little love scene comes to its close. There is, however, just one last comment on the “grande amour” as Mrs. Van Daan takes the stage with a noise that is supposed to be the authentic Yiddish version of “Eh-heh!”

For anyone who has read and understood the diary of Anne Frank I need not point out the utter travesty this scene commits. Anne’s relation to Peter was notable for its lack of pretension, its candor and ingenuousness, its freedom from all the ritualized and self-conscious behavior that seems to be the only sign by which we recognize a “normal” adolescent. Peter is a person whom Anne has found herself able to be and talk with more honestly and easily than with anyone else—even her father—and without the constraint that so oppresses her when she is in the presence of “grown-ups.” In the play it is just the reverse. Anne and Peter cannot really speak to each other, and Anne’s preliminary toilette strikes us as a symbol of this state of affairs, for it shows that she cannot even go to Peter as her natural self. As she performed her last rites of the good night kiss for everyone in the room, I could not help remembering the moment in the real Anne’s diary when she irritably mentions not feeling like kissing people good night any more, and that it occurs about the same time that she begins to reveal her growing attachment to Peter.

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There are numerous other touches of this sort which emphasize the central failure of the play to catch the spirit of the work from which it springs. The plot literally thickens with misrepresentations. Anne’s conflicts with her mother are inanely arbitrary and often seem perverse. This is because the character of Mrs. Frank is not created, and what the Anne of the diary reacted to is never here disclosed. Anne’s keen and well-articulated insights always told us what it was in other people and herself that caused the friction between them. In her deepest self she never really accepts the explanation that it is “just a stage” she is going through. Arid when, in the last act, Anne is made to say, “Daddy was right, it was just a phase I was going through,” what was left of my sorely tried generosity turned to gall. There was nothing left to hope for, since the very pith and marrow of the diary had with this glib stroke, so wisely spoken, been swept away.

The Broadway Anne Frank had turned out to be not much more than the Jewish Corliss Archer (the adolescent girl in Kiss and Tell)—a more human and endearing Corliss than we have had for some time perhaps, but still another image of that fixed American idea of the adolescent, the central imperative of which is that this species of creature is not to be taken seriously. (Unless, of course, he becomes a delinquent.)

If the diary of Anne Frank is remarkable for any one thing, it is for the way in which she is able to command our deepest seriousness about everything she is going through—the way she makes us forget she is an adolescent and makes us wish that this way of experiencing life were not so soon lost by some of us, and much sooner found by most of us. Ironically for her, the Anne Frank on Broadway cannot command our seriousness, for all Anne’s true seriousness—her honesty, intelligence, and inner strength—has been left out of the script.

It is impossible here to consider why and how this myth of adolescence has taken hold in America, and why Anne Frank’s dramatizers seem to have lost touch with her, and have dealt with her story in so false and shallow a fashion. But if we in America cannot present her with the respect and integrity and seriousness she deserves, then I think we should not try to present her at all. Not all adolescents, even in America, are the absurd young animals we know from stage and screen. Not all of them are able to spare us the agony of taking them seriously, Or themselves the agony of trying to grow up. Not all of them are the desperate young clowns who never do grow up, but only quiet down. Anne Frank was not an “American” adolescent, as Mr. Hackett and Miss Goodrich would have us believe. She was an unaffected young girl, exceedingly alive, deep, and honest—experiencing more, and in a better way perhaps, than many of us do in the course of a whole lifetime.

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Not one of the characters in The Diary of Anne Frank is brought to life—not even Anne’s father, who is her chiefest source of wisdom, dignity, and strength in the book. It is not the actors’ fault; they are all at least competent. They are simply uninspired by the script. Margot barely utters a word, and Dussel is just a laugh man. All are primarily foils for the antics of Anne rather than the people she lived and shared and struggled with for two clandestine years. The wonderful patches of their conversation which she wrote down in her diary are never heard. The daily, active dedication to learning of the Frank family, the political discussions that Anne complained about, the wireless that was always tuned to the BBC, and the confirmed Anglophiles who listened to it (Anne’s diary seldom mentions the Americans; it is the English who are really fighting the war, and Churchill is their great man)—all these never find their way into the play. They would have been forgivable omissions if the spirit of Anne herself had survived them. That it did not can only turn us back to her real diary for the kind of memorial she requires.

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