Anne Frank

[Aleph]

Diesen Thread zu Natalies "historischem" http://www.natalieportman.com/german/annefrank.htm eröffnet ein für uns unbefriedigendes Souvenier-Angebot:

Der Online-Shop der Broadway-Zeitschrift Playbill - The Playbill Store - hat ein Set mit vier http://www.playbillstore.com/playcolglas11.html herausgebracht, von denen jedes fünf Titelbilder aus der Broadway-Theatersaison 1997-1998 zeigt:


GLASS FOUR: (..) Diary of Anne Frank (..)

Da das Set leider nur in den USA zu bestellen ist, bleibt nur die Hoffnung, daß sich die Gläser demnächst auf eBay wiederfinden. Oder man bittet amerikanische Freunde um ein Care-Paket.

--
Aleph

[Antares]

hm... bei diesem thema stösst mir immer die ganze israel sache hoch...

(ich werde mich jetzt hier nicht auslassen, das ist ja schliesslich ein natalie portman forum hier.)

[Aleph]

Anne Frank war Deutsche, floh mit vier Jahren mit ihren Eltern vor den Nazis ins holländische Exil und starb schließlich mit 15 Jahren nach ihrer Verschleppung jämmerlich in einem Konzentrationslager, kurz vor der Befreiung.

Ich kann keinerlei sachliche Verbindung zu den heutigen Ereignissen in Israel entdecken.

--
Aleph

[Antares]

wie ich schon sagete, ich will nicht über das auslassen. aber schon in deinem satz sehe ich etwa 2 sachen, die vergleichbar sind.

[Aleph]

Vielleicht solltest Du jetzt erst recht darlegen, was Du mit Deinen nebulösen Andeutungen tatsächlich meinst.

Ich finde es bemerkenswert, daß Du Dich mit Projekten von Natalie, die die deutsche Nazi-Vergangenheit zum Gegenstand haben, nicht auseinandersetzen kannst, ohne daß Dir "immer die ganze israel sache hoch"-stößt. Die Assoziationskette "Anne Frank -> Jüdin -> Israel" halte ich für denkbar platt. Wenn Dir das also eine Erwähnung wert war, macht sich das ungute Gefühl breit, Du wolltest die aktuellen Ereignisse in Israel mit den Naziverbrechen vergleichen. Wer einen derart undifferenzierten Antisemitismus vertritt, der sollte sich fragen, wie er ein Natfan sein kann und sein Gift woanders absondern.

Klär' mich auf, daß ich Deine Andeutungen völlig mißverstanden habe.

--
Aleph

[Antares]

ach so, findest du.
dazu kann ich eigentlich nur sagen: glauben ist nicht gleich tun.

ich habe überhaupt nichts gegen juden.
aber ich habe etwas gegen leute die denken sie können ohne grund in ein land wo leute leben eindringen, diese leute jahrelang in lager stecken, vertreiben oder töten, und dann noch sagen sie kämpfen doch nur gegen den terrorismus.
aber eigentlich könnten wir das ganze umdrehen. du sagst wenn ich etwas gegen diese verbrechen habe, habe ich etwas gegen alle juden. das heisst also auf dich bezogen, wenn ein ausländer irgend eine kacke macht, sind alle ausländer für dich scheisse.

klär mich bitte auf wenn ich da etwas falsch verstanden habe.

das wird hier langsam eine grundsatz diskussion die überhaupt nichts mit natalie portman zu tun hat. ich habe nichts dagegen diese weiterzuziehen, aber finde eigentlich dass sie nicht hier her gehört.

ich schreibe dies als zusatz:
du hast recht. es war nicht ganz richtig von mir mit diesem thema anzufangen. aber es ist kein gift ablassen. nur ist dieses thema etwas, was für mich... mir kommen dazu viele worte in den sinn, aber keines passt.
stellt euch vor irgend eine gruppe leute kommen in euer land, und sagen geht weg, das ist jetzt uns. wenn ihr euch wehrt werdet ihr getötet.
es wird um alles ein drama gemacht, nur dieses thema ist ein tabu. wenn man darüber spricht wird man als judenfeind abgestempfelt.

[ Diese Nachricht wurde geändert von: Antares am 2001-12-21 18:38 ]

[Aleph]

> ich habe überhaupt nichts gegen juden.

Dann solltest Du in politischen Diskussionen auf "Nazivergleiche" verzichten, oder - wenn Du das nicht kannst - erst gar keine politischen Diskussionen provozieren.

> du hast recht. es war nicht ganz richtig von mir mit diesem thema anzufangen.

So ist es. Das Thema hat hier überhaupt nichts zu suchen, weil es weder mit Anne Frank noch mit Natalie Portman irgendetwas zu tun hat. Deinen Äußerungen sind nur zwei Gründe zu entnehmen, warum Dir bei der Erwähnung von Anne Frank die heutigen Ereignisse in Israel "aufstoßen":

a) Anne Frank und Natalie Portman sind Jüdinnen. In Israel leben auch Juden.

Dieser Umstand reicht Dir offensichtlich, um eine gedankliche Verbindung zwischen Ereignissen herzustellen, die mehr als 60 Jahre auseinanderliegen, denn...

b) Du hältst die heutige Politik der israelischen Regierung für vergleichbar mit den Verbrechen der Nazis, insbesondere mit deren Überfall auf Nachbarländer und mit dem Massenmord an den Juden.

Bei solchen Vergleichen kommt mir das Grausen. Die Verbrechen der Nazis an den Juden und anderen Minderheiten waren und bleiben in der Geschichte einmalig und sind nicht vergleichbar mit anderen Verbrechen. Denn da hat eine Regierung systematisch und willkürlich die Verschleppung und Ermordung eines großen Teils der Bevölkerung im In- und Ausland geplant und dies planmäßig und menschenverachtend mit ihrem übermächtigen Staatsapparat durchgeführt. Du kannst die israelische Politik kritisieren, aber dabei zu dem Totschlagargument zu greifen, deren Vorgehen sei vergleichbar mit dem der Nazis, ist ungeheuerlich. Im vorliegenden Fall ist der Vergleich besonders perfide: "Die Juden", die die Opfer der Nazidiktatur waren, sollen pauschal durch den Vergleich mit den Nazis selber zu Tätern abgestempelt werden. Solche Vergleiche spielen Neonazis in die Hände, weil sie die Greuel der Nazis relativieren und damit verharmlosen. Darüber hinaus beleidigt der Vergleich die Opfer der Nazis von damals. Solche Äußerungen bewegen sich hart am Rande zur Volksverhetzung.

"Nazivergleiche" sind im übrigen auch deshalb tabu, weil nach einem solchen Vergleich eine politische Auseinandersetzung nicht mehr möglich ist. Wer vom politischen Gegner den Nazis gleichgestellt wird, ist als Verhandlungspartner vollkommen diskreditiert, weil er durch den Vergleich als unverbesserlicher Todfeind charakterisiert wird. Mit einem Todfeind kann man aber nicht mehr zusammenleben oder verhandeln. Den muß man töten, oder man wird von ihm getötet.

Die Sinnlosigkeit einer solchen Argumentation sollte gerade mit Blick auf die Ereignisse in Israel einleuchten. Dort werden zwei Parteien auf absehbare Zeit zusammenleben müssen. Wenn eine Seite die andere für Nazis hält, ist man genauso weit weg von einer politischen Auseinandersetzung, wie es braucht, um Bomben zu zünden und sich gegenseitig umzubringen.

Wenn Du in einem politischen Forum die israelische Politik mit guten Gründen angreifen willst, bleibt Dir das unbenommen. Auf den Nazivergleich würde ich an Deiner Stelle auch dort verzichten, weil man sowas aus den oben genannten Gründen einfach nicht macht. Hier in einem Thread über Anne Frank ist der Vergleich doppelt deplaziert, weil der einzige inhaltliche (und willkürliche) Anknüpfungspunkt zu allem Überfluß auch noch die Religionszugehörigkeit der Beteiligten ist. Dadurch erhärtet sich der Eindruck, daß die Äußerungen antisemitisch motiviert (oder sehr unüberlegt und dumm) sind.

Sowas sollte man vermeiden, denn es gibt andere Formen, um Politik, die man für falsch oder ungerecht oder gar verbrecherisch hält, zu kritisieren.

--
Aleph

[AvE]

Zu den Auseinandersetzungen in Israel muß man die Schuldigen auf beiden Seiten sehen. Beide Völker, Israelis und Palästinenser, oder besser gesagt deren Führung sind in ihrem Handeln mittlerweile von blinder Wut geprägt. Die eine Seite macht einen kriegerischen Anschlag, die andere Seite schlägt dementsprechend zurück. Und so spitzt sich die Lage dramatisch zu. Die Einsicht muß von beiden Parteien kommen, erst dann kann es einen Frieden geben. Die Leidtragenden sind aber wie immer die Zivilisten, zu denen auch Frauen und Kinder gehören.

Fazit: Das gefährlichste Tier ist der Mensch, es tötet sogar Artgenossen.

[Antares]

@ Aleph ich würde diese diskussion gerne weiter führen. (vor allem weil es mir scheint, dass die meisten leute die ich kenne neonazis sind - eingenommen meine lehrer)
aber nicht in diesem forum. hast du einen anderen vorschlag?

ich habe deinen text jetzt 3 mal gelesen, und bin zur kenntnis gekommen, dass du entweder nicht wirklich informiert bist, oder die wahrheit nicht wahrhaben willst - wie so viele. natürlich sind meine argumente eine intepretation, aber ich habe festgestellt das du kein einziges argument gebracht hast - ich habe sie.

[ Diese Nachricht wurde geändert von: Antares am 2001-12-21 23:04 ]

[Antares]

es wird wohl in diesem jahr nicht mehr zu einer diskussion kommen - ich werde morgen früh in die ferien fahren - aber wenn noch etwas ist mailto:mail@v-arx.com

ich wünsche euch allen eine frohe weihnacht.

[Aleph]

> @ Aleph ich würde diese diskussion gerne weiter führen. (vor allem weil es mir scheint,
> dass die meisten leute die ich kenne neonazis sind - eingenommen meine lehrer)

Dazu kann ich keine Stellung nehmen, weil Du schon wieder nur andeutest, was Du überhaupt meinst. Was für Auffassungen vertreten die Leute, die Du kennst und Deine Lehrer? Warum soll sie das zu Neonazis machen? Zur Ironie zwischen Deinen Klammern ist anzumerken, daß diese Behauptung nicht von mir stammen kann, da ich lediglich darauf hinwies, daß "Nazivergleiche" den Neonazis in die Hand spielen, weil sie die Verbrechen der Nazis in ihrem ganzen Ausmaß relativieren.

> aber nicht in diesem forum. hast du einen anderen vorschlag?

Ich habe kein Interesse an einer Diskussion über die politische Lage in Israel, zu der Du Deine Meinung bisher auch nur unzusammenhängend geäußert hast. Ich habe ausschließlich dargelegt, daß Dein angedeuteter Nazivergleich in diesem Forum und diesem Thread eine Entgleisung darstellt und grundsätzlich in jeder politischen Diskussionen ein Tabu sein sollte, wenn man ernst genommen werden will. Denn der Nazivergleich ist ein Totschlagargument, mit dem man es sich zu einfach macht, auf Kosten der Opfer von damals und einer sinnvollen Konfliktlösung heute.

> ich habe deinen text jetzt 3 mal gelesen, und bin zur kenntnis gekommen, dass du
> entweder nicht wirklich informiert bist, oder die wahrheit nicht wahrhaben willst - wie so viele.

Die Wahrheit worüber? Über die deutsche Geschichte zwischen 1933 und 1945 halte ich mich für überdurchschnittlich informiert. Meine Kenntnislage und meine Auffassungen zur politischen Situation in Israel und in den palästinensischen Autonomiegebieten und der Lage der Menschenrechte dort kennst Du gar nicht. Meine diesbezüglichen Meinungen sind auch vollkommen irrelevant, wenn es um die Frage geht, daß sich Dein Nazivergleich hier verbietet. Das bedeutet nicht, daß ich irgendwelche Wahrheiten nicht wahrhaben will. Stammtisch- und Keulenargumente wie der Nazivergleich helfen nicht, Wahrheiten zu ergründen und Lösungen in Konflikten zu finden. Durch einen Vergleich von Verantwortlichen mit Nazis ändert man keine Verhältnisse zum Besseren. Man relativiert nur die Naziverbrechen und beleidigt die Opfer von damals.

> natürlich sind meine argumente eine intepretation, aber ich habe festgestellt das
> du kein einziges argument gebracht hast - ich habe sie.

Argumente wofür und wogegen? Zur Rechtfertigung, wie Du beim Thema Anne Frank über die Naziverbrechen zur aktuellen Politik Israels gerätst, hast Du nichts vorgetragen. Du hast im wesentlichen Deine Gefühlslage zum Thema Anne Frank beschrieben und in allgemeinen Stichworten, die Deinen ungeheuerlichen Nazivergleich nicht rechtfertigen, Deine Einschätzung der Lage in Israel angedeutet.

Eine Diskussion setzt meiner Ansicht nach voraus, daß derjenige, der sie führen will, seine Argumente zusammenhängend und verständlich vorträgt und sich nicht in düsteren und nebulösen Andeutungen ergeht. Meine Argumente, warum man die Verbrechen der Nazis in aktuellen Diskussionen nicht zu Vergleichen heranzieht und solche Vergleiche gerade in diesem Thread völlig fehl am Platz sind, habe ich eingehend dargelegt. Darauf bist Du jedoch nicht eingegangen.

--
Aleph

[aths]

Um mal Klartext zu sprechen: Nat ist offenbar Jüdin. Und das ist gut so. Denn gerade dieses "jüdische" (sofern man davon sprechen kann) Gesicht ist jawohl wunderschön.

Soweit vom ästhetischen Standpunkt.

Was Politik betrifft: So sollten sich gewisse Herren, denen gleich das ganze Israel hochkommt, vielleicht mal mit Nats politischer Einstellung befassen. Des weiteren sei ein klein wenig Bibelstudium empfohlen (ich bin selbst Atheist) um den Begriff "Israel" im historischen Kontext einordnen zu können.

Was Nazis betrifft, so hat Natalie intellektuell deutlich mehr auf dem Kasten als alle Nazi-Größen zusammen.

Ich sehe absolut keinen Grund, künstlich eine Verbindung zur falschen israelischen Palästinenser-Politik herstellen zu wollen.

[Aleph]

New York Times

December 5, 1997, Friday

MOVIES, PERFORMING ARTS/WEEKEND DESK

THEATER REVIEW; This Time, Another
Anne Confronts Life In the Attic

By BEN BRANTLEY

To see Natalie Portman on the stage of the Music Box Theater is to
understand what Proust meant when he spoke of girls in flower. Ms. Portman,
a film actress making her Broadway debut, is only 16, and despite her
precocious resume, she gives off a pure rosebud freshness that can't be faked.
There is ineffable grace in her awkwardness, and her very skin seems to glow
with the promise of miraculous transformations.

That the fate of the character Ms. Portman portrays is known in advance by
most of her audience turns that radiance into something that is also infinitely
chilling, however, and you may even feel guilty about basking in the warmth of
a flame that you realize will be horribly and abruptly extinguished.

Ms. Portman has the title role in the new production of ''The Diary of Anne
Frank,'' the dramatization of the legendary journals of a Jewish girl hiding from
the Nazis in Amsterdam. And whatever the shortcomings of Ms. Portman's
performance and the production itself, which opened last night, the evening
never lets us forget the inhuman darkness waiting to claim its incandescently
human heroine.

This version, adapted (which in this instance means almost entirely rewritten)
by Wendy Kesselman from Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's 1955
script and directed by James Lapine, offers no treacly consolations about the
triumph of the spirit. Indeed, the effect is more like watching a vibrant,
exquisite fawn seen through the lens of a hunter's rifle.

An uncompromising steadiness of gaze, embedded in a bleak sense of
historical context, is the strongest element in a production more notable for its
moral conscientiousness than for theatrical inspiration. This version is
undeniably moving, with snuffles and sobs from the audience beginning well
before the first act is over, and there are beautifully drawn, organic-seeming
moments throughout.

Yet in portraying the denizens of the the famous ''secret annex,'' the actors,
who include such top-of-the-line veterans as Linda Lavin and George Hearn,
don't always project the sense of a unified ensemble; it is often as if they had
set their performances to different metronomes, when the feeling of a natural
flow of time is essential.

As a consequence, the production can at times seem little more than
serviceable. And yet somehow with this work, particularly as Ms. Kesselman
has reshaped it, serviceable can be enough. The horror of its central situation,
and the natural dramatic tightness it lends itself to, continue to hold the
attention with an iron clamp. It also doesn't hurt that many people who see the
play bring their own resonant associations with the diary. Clear, honorable
and workmanlike, this ''Anne Frank'' doesn't achieve greatness in itself. But it
doesn't diminish the magnitude of the events behind it.

It should be noted that ''Anne Frank'' returns to Broadway with an unwieldy
load of polemical baggage, including furious debates over the diaries'
appropriation as a pop commodity. The most resounding salvo was fired two
months ago in an essay in The New Yorker by the novelist and critic Cynthia
Ozick, who argued that Anne Frank's journals had been ''infantilized,
Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized,'' especially in their translation to
the stage. ''In celebrating Anne Frank's years in the secret annex,'' Ms. Ozick
wrote, ''the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled.''

Ms. Kesselman's reworking of the original script, which incorporates new
material from the complete editions of the diaries made available in the last
decade, goes a long way in redressing such objections. The
Goodrich-Hackett script, under the director Garson Kanin's supervision, had
bleached out much of its source's specific ethnic content for fear of alienating
mainstream audiences. Correspondingly, the unspeakable destiny that awaited
Anne was eclipsed by a disproportionate emphasis on the girl's idealism.

This new interpretation never relaxes its awareness of the hostile world
beyond the attic that was the Franks' sanctuary and prison for two
claustrophobic years, nor of the religious identity that made them a quarry.
The earlier version began in a scene of sentimental hindsight, with Anne's
father discovering her diaries; this one leaps, with a gripping immediacy, into
medias res.

Adrianne Lobel's set, modeled as closely as the Music Box permits on the
rooms behind Otto Frank's offices where the family lived, is in full view when
we arrive. And for any reader of the diaries, it is hauntingly eloquent before
any actor appears.

So is the entrance of the Franks themselves: Otto (Mr. Hearn); his wife, Edith
(Sophie Hayden), and their daughters, Margot (Missy Yager) and Ms.
Portman's Anne, who arrive onstage wet and disoriented from the rainy trip to
their new home. As they turn to us, struggling out of their coats, the large
yellow stars sewn onto their clothes are suddenly, glaringly visible.

It's a wonderful piece of staging, unforced yet emphatic; it establishes
Judaism, and the ways it is perceived, as the Franks' central defining identity.
''Look, it's still there,'' says Anne of the shadow of the star that remains after
she has torn it off.

Indeed. Perplexed, often defiant references to what it means to be a Jew in
the occupied Netherlands abound in the diaries, and Ms. Kesselman has
incorporated as many as time allows: from Anne's catalogue of the activities
forbidden Jews in Amsterdam to her vision of a former classmate in a
concentration camp. The evolving sophistication of her writing about the world
around her is far more evident now. So is her lyrical consideration of her
burgeoning sexuality, and Ms. Kesselman has included a beautiful passage,
nicely read by Ms. Portman, in which the girl describes the transporting effects
of pictures of female nudes in art books.

As welcome as these additions are, one wishes that the voice-overs in which
many of them are delivered had been less clumsily amplified. The effect is
bizarre, as if Anne had found a public-address system in that attic. And there
is also the sense that in combing through the rich trove of the unedited diaries,
Ms. Kesselman was hard put to select just what to use. There is an occasional
feeling of material being shoehorned in and confusingly truncated.

This gives the production a fragmentary quality its predecessor didn't have.
Mr. Lapine's staging doesn't always accommodate the lapses from slice-of-life
naturalism, though there are moments throughout, particularly among the
younger actors, where everything clicks into place. And the climactic scene
that finds the characters festively eating strawberries just before they are
captured is everything it should be: a wrenching but impeccably rendered fall
from what has become ordinary life into perdition.

Presumably, with further time the talented cast -- which includes Ms. Lavin,
Harris Yulin, Austin Pendleton and the young Jonathan Kaplan as the other
inhabitants of the annex -- will grow into a more comfortable ensemble. As it
is, all the actors reach isolated, individual heights, most notably in the second
act, when the stress of confinement finally brings out the Darwinian animal in
everyone.

But in the first act, the performers are still oddly stiff as a team, and there's a
sense, in ways that go beyond their characters' discomfort with unfamiliar
circumstances, that they have yet to find a shared rhythm.

As the endlessly patient father, Mr. Hearn has an expressly theatrical, heroic
voice and carriage that don't provide the troubled, affectionate shading to
convey his all-important relationship with Anne. Ms. Lavin brings an
impressive technical bravura to the role of the vain, anxious Mrs. Van Daan
that achieves some splendid effects, as in a stunning new monologue for the
character, and others that seem artificially calculated.

Mr. Pendleton appears slightly at sea as the graceless dentist who is forced to
share Anne's room (though the scene in which she introduces him to their
sleeping quarters is charming). Mr. Yulin, as the cynical, self-serving Mr. Van
Daan, and Ms. Hayden, as Anne's fragile mother, are better in conveying, in
very different ways, the aura of the older, more genteel world that shaped
their characters.

Ms. Yager and Mr. Kaplan, as the Van Daan son with whom Anne discovers
love, provide affectingly restrained portraits of adolescence cramped and
frustrated by circumstance. Ms. Portman's comparative lack of stage
experience shows, but in a strange way, this works to her advantage.

Even when her line readings are stilted, her delicately expressive face never
fails her. It becomes, as it should, the evening's barometer of the changing
moods in the annex. She has, moreover, an endlessly poignant quality of
spontaneity, and of boundless energy in search of an outlet, that is subtly
modulated as the evening goes on.

In Philip Roth's short novel ''The Ghost Writer,'' the narrator speaks of Anne
the writer in her diaries. ''It's like watching an accelerated film of a fetus
sprouting a face,'' he says. Without ever toning down her innate vitality, Ms.
Portman does indeed progress from self-centered girlishness to the cusp of
self-aware womanhood. To learn again that she will not be allowed to go
further still shatters the heart.

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

By Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett; newly adapted by Wendy
Kesselman; directed by James Lapine; sets by Adrianne Lobel; costumes by
Martin Pakledinaz; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Dan Moses
Schreier; hair and wigs by Paul Huntley; production stage manager, David
Hyslop; general management, Stuart Thompson; technical supervisor, Gene
O'Donovan. Presented by David Stone, Amy Nederlander-Case, Jon B.
Platt, Jujamcyn Theaters and Hal Luftig, in association with Harriet Newman
Leve and James D. Stern. At the Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th Street,
Manhattan.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Anne Frank), George Hearn (Otto Frank), Linda
Lavin (Mrs. Van Daan), Harris Yulin (Mr. Van Daan), Austin Pendleton (Mr.
Dussel), Sophie Hayden (Edith Frank), Missy Yager (Margot Frank), Jessica
Walling (Miep Gies), Jonathan Kaplan (Peter Van Daan), Philip Goodwin
(Mr. Kraler), Peter Kybart (First Man), James Hallett (Second Man) and
Eddie Kaye Thomas (Third Man).

Published: 12 - 05 - 1997 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 1 , Page 1

[Aleph]

New York Times

MOVIES, PERFORMING ARTS/WEEKEND DESK | May 8, 1998, Friday
AT THE MOVIES

By Bernard Weinraub (NYT) 1518 words
Late Edition - Final, Section E, Page 10, Column 5

ABSTRACT - At the Movies column; cocaine-dusted world of Manhattan
discos in 1970's is recalled in two new films, 54, directed by Mark
Christopher, and The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman; Andre
Braugher discusses end of his six-year run on television series Homicide and
his plans to make movies; Natalie Portman, 16-year-old Israeli-born actress
from Long Island, ends role as Anne Frank on Broadway and plans college
and film work; she also plays mother of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in
first of three Star Wars 'prequel' movies; photos (S)

[Aleph]

New York Times

December 21, 1997, Sunday

ARTS AND LEISURE DESK

SUNDAY VIEW; A New 'Anne Frank' Still
Stuck in the 50's

By Vincent Canby

WHEN FRANCES GOODRICH and Albert Hackett adapted ''Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl'' for the 1955 Broadway stage production, they
wrote a play in terms that would speak to audiences of the mid-1950's. The
war against Nazi Germany had been over only 10 years. Israel was a new
state, aged seven. Elie Wiesel's ''Night'' would not be published in English for
another five years. Adolf Eichmann was alive and well and living in South
America and, thus, Hannah Arendt hadn't yet had occasion to write
''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.''

The magnitude of the Holocaust was still being discovered. It remained
incomprehensible, except in the testimonies of particular survivors and
witnesses.

In that context, Anne Frank's diary, a record of the two years the Frank
family spent hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam loft, was an unexpected
best seller, eventually translated into 56 languages. ''The Diary of Anne
Frank,'' the Hacketts' serviceable adaptation, became a successful Broadway
play. The book, the stage version and George Stevens's opulently
photographed and scored 1959 film provided a way to understand the
Holocaust: they apotheosized the precocious German-Jewish girl who, just
weeks before the war's end, died at Bergen-Belsen. Especially in the play and
the film, Anne Frank took on the idealized dimensions of a bright, sensitive,
teen-ager who might have stepped out of a bright, sensitive Hollywood movie
of the day.

Unfortunately, she still has those dimensions in the latest revival of the
Hacketts' play, ''newly adapted by'' Wendy Kesselman and directed by
James Lapine, which is now at the Music Box Theater.

Much has been written about Ms. Kesselman's attempts to emphasize the
story's Jewish ethnicity, which more recent critics have said the Hacketts
downplayed for 1950's audiences, and about the restoration of some of the
rougher edges to Anne's character, which Otto Frank deleted from her diary
in the first published manuscript.

Yet in spite of the tinkering (and it seems just that for anyone who remembers
the original stage production with respect), ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' can
now be identified as an artifact of conventional Broadway play-making of the
1950's. It is decent enough for its time but, because it is so banally written,
fails to recreate today the sense of urgency, loss and surprise with which it
was greeted in the 1950's.

Time has overtaken not the story but the method of the play. In an unhappy
way, this production might prompt you to remember ''Shoah,'' Claude
Lanzmann's remarkable, almost nine-and-a-half-hour documentary released in
1985. ''Shoah'' is an oral history of the Holocaust that evokes its meaning not
with old newsreels nor by any attempts to reconstruct the past. Instead, the
film remains entirely in the present of the 1980's. It recalls the past through
testimony of survivors. These people cling to their memories even as time puts
those memories at an ever-increasing distance, covering them in scar tissue,
eventually to wipe them out, the ultimate indignity the film means to subvert.

There is no such grand design behind ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' and none
was ever intended. In celebrating Anne's diary in the simple terms of theatrical
melodrama, the play, you now realize, doesn't do justice to the original
document, to its author, or to the experience it represents.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick, the novelist and
essayist, damned Otto Frank and the entire Anne Frank industry that has
grown up around the diary. Anne's real story, she wrote, has been ''bluntly
and arrogantly denied.'' Yet in suggesting that the diary might better have been
burned, Ms. Ozick seemed to be exercising the artist's license to be
outrageous to make a point.

The slightly new version of ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' certainly isn't helped
by the performance of Natalie Portman, the 16-year-old Israeli-born,
American-bred film actress who makes her stage debut playing Anne aged 13
to 15.

Ms. Portman's Anne is exceptionally pretty in the tradition of earlier diarists
played by Susan Strasberg and Millie Perkins.

SHE IS ALSO EARNESTLY artificial, having been directed to behave in a
fashion that might have embarrassed even Sandra Dee's Gidget. Ms. Portman
seems never to walk if she can skip; when she lies on the floor, tummy down,
heels up, writing in her beloved diary, her little feet are forever kicking back
and forth like a 4-year-old's. The girl we see has no relation to the thoughts
she speaks, either in person or as prerecorded narration.

Ms. Kesselman has dropped the play's original framing device in which Otto
Frank returns to Amsterdam from Auschwitz to find Anne's diary. Instead, the
new opening is more forthright: Otto, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters,
Margot and Anne, with only those possessions they can carry, arrive to go
into hiding in the loft that will be their home until the war's end. They are
followed by their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan, the Van Daans'
16-year-old son, Peter, and, still later, by Mr. Dussel, the timid, bewildered
dentist.

Though the loft, which they call the annex, is supposed to be cruelly cramped
for eight
people, the set at the Music Box, which is said to be modeled on the original
annex, looks spacious. Apparently more attention has been paid to
architectural accuracy than to the theatrical illusion of confinement, which so
severely tests the mettle of these besieged fugitives.

Ms. Kesselman's interpolations are very mild indeed. Anne's disagreements
with her mother are something less than momentous. At one point she
acknowledges her budding sexuality in a fervent, self-addressed admission of
curiosity about her own body and her desire to touch another's. It is a good
speech, but it seems to belong to a different character in another play.

Left intact is Anne's declaration of her continuing belief that people are good
at heart. In the original script, this speech ends the play on a note of high,
wishful improbability as Otto Frank finishes reading Anne's diary. In the new
version, it is more or less shoehorned in as a distant, almost muffled voiceover
when Anne and the others are taken into custody. Anne's last lines now are
far darker, and the play ends with the focus on Otto Frank, the bereft survivor
of the camps, as he graphically describes what eventually happened to each of
the other members of his household.

Here is a ''Diary of Anne Frank'' without an Anne, which is why the
production appears to be carried by supporting actors in roles that, though not
exactly complex, are something less than idealized. Especially good are Harris
Yulin and Linda Lavin as Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan, decent folk in ordinary life
who come close to cracking in the terrible circumstances of their confinement.
Also noteworthy is Austin Pendleton as Mr. Dussel, the fussy dentist who is
allergic to cats. There is nothing wrong with George Hearn and Sophie
Hayden, who play Anne's parents, and Missy Yager, as Margot Frank, but
they don't have much to do except serve the plot.

This production will be of interest mainly to those who have never before
encountered ''The Diary,'' like the woman in her 20's who sat in front of me
the night I saw the play. As her escort was whispering in her ear just before
the performance began, she suddenly drew back and stared at him in surprise.
''You mean,'' she said, ''she dies at the end?''

Time is brutal.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

Yet with wit and ingenuity time can sometimes be outmaneuvered, as the
Drama Dept. is demonstrating with its ambitious, buoyant show, ''Uncle Tom's
Cabin or Life Among the Lowly'' at the Greenwich House Theater. Its last
performance before the holidays is today at 3, but it will reopen on Jan. 6 for
a brief additional run.

The production is no mere adaptation of the Harriet Beecher Stowe classic,
but an exuberant consideration of the novel that, a year after its publication in
1852, had sold 305,000 copies in this country and an estimated 2,500,000
copies in the rest of the world in English and in translation.

As ''derived by'' Floraine Kay and Randolph Curtis Rand, who is also the
director, the show is a collage, alternately funny and genuinely moving. It
includes dramatized scenes from the book, bits and pieces of six different
stage adaptations, critical commentaries, minstrel show variations and
excerpts from slave narratives.

Five very gifted actors -- three men and two women -- play the dozens of
roles without regard to their own sex or race, sometimes slipping from one
character into another in mid-scene. This keeps the members of the audience
deliciously alert even as they sometimes struggle to find their way through the
various narratives, testimonies and sheer high jinks.

It helps to have some knowledge of the novel, but it is not essential. The show
is so provocative that it should send you back to the source material, as well
as to such subsidiary texts as Edmund Wilson's fine essay on Stowe in his
collection ''Patriotic Gore.'' Among other things, this ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''
successfully evokes the extraordinary phenomenon set off by the writer of
whom Abraham Lincoln said, when she came to the White House: ''So this is
the little lady who made this big war.''

The show doesn't try to recreate the past. Rather, it brings the past to life in
present theatrical terms that embrace history, manners, morals, stereotypes,
ideals, fears and aspirations. The result is another original theatrical work by
the group that brought you ''June Moon'' (which is now in previews at the
Variety Arts Theater, where it reopens in January) and the current ''As Bees
in Honey Drown'' at the Lucille Lortel Theater.

The splendid cast members: K. Todd Freeman, Stacy Highsmith, Gretchen
Krich, Noel Robichaux and David Wheir.

'The Sunshine Boys'

There is no doubt about it now: ''The Sunshine Boys'' is Neil Simon's ''War
and Peace,'' his ''Young Frankenstein,'' his ''Long Day's Journey Into Night,''
his ''Gold Rush,'' his chef-d'oeuvre. That is apparent in the National Actors
Theater's hilarious, beautifully performed, very sweet revival of the 1972
Broadway hit. Jack Klugman and Tony Randall are the stars, John Tillinger is
the director, and it's now at the Lyceum Theater.

Everything came perfectly together for Mr. Simon when he wrote this tale of
two ancient vaudevillians, Willie Clark (Mr. Klugman) and Al Lewis (Mr.
Randall), who are asked to team up again for a television special years after
their partnership dissolved in high dudgeon. ''The Sunshine Boys'' is about
theater, about male friendship and about comedy as an endlessly rewarding if
exhausting way of life.

The play is also as elastic as the women's girdles that once were the staple of
Bob Hope's monologues. ''The Sunshine Boys'' fits the particular talents of the
team of Klugman and Randall as snugly as it did those of Jack Albertson and
Sam Levine, the stars of the first Broadway production, and Walter Matthau
and George Burns, the stars of the still incomparable 1975 film.

Of course Mr. Klugman and Mr. Randall have been preparing for this for
years with their television series based on Mr. Simon's runner-up
chef-d'oeuvre, ''The Odd Couple.'' They don't disappoint. Mr. Klugman is
grandly funny as the irascible, slobbish, short-term memory-impaired Clark
and Mr. Randall the model of a pricelessly patient straight-man as the
fastidious Lewis. Together they create an evening of Broadway theater
memorable for its explosive laughter.

My only critical comment: Why didn't they do it before?

Published: 12 - 21 - 1997, Late Edition - Final, Section 2, Column 1, Page 5