Mandy Patinkin's Anne Frank 'Compulsion'

Mandy Patinkin appears so seldom onstage these days that it feels wrong - ungrateful, even - to be less than thrilled with the results.

But here he is, punching his way passionately through "Compulsion," Rinne Groff's confusing and perhaps confused fact-based fiction about one man's struggle in the early '50s to get Anne Frank's diary translated into English and turned into a play.

But this man - called Sid Silver but based on writer Meyer Levin - is not just deeply interested in Anne's inspirational tragedy or in confronting a New York literary establishment intent on making her story less Jewish and more universal.

Instead, as the title suggests, this Sid was obsessed - for starters - with Anne and with his importance in the fate of her diary. As directed by Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, Sid goes from petulant, unbalanced and obnoxious in the first act to delusional, paranoid and even more obnoxious in the second act.

Groff, Eustis and Patinkin must know things about Sid that make him more interesting than he comes off in these inexplicable outbursts and kaleidoscopic variations on weeping and sobbing. But they never make us care about him before they want us to care about his downward spiral.

Patinkin, an expert in making unpleasant characters fascinating, doesn't get the help here to modulate Sid into more than a study in pathology wrapped in an Anne Frank crusade. Given the actor's intensity and intelligence, even this may have worked in a more surreal style.

But Groff uses real names - Lillian Hellman, agent Floria Lasky - to ground the plot in reality. And the people around Sid (all played by Hannah Cabell and Matte Osian) talk to him as if he were a reasonable human being. Nor does it help that Sid's French wife and their Israeli theater colleague speak with accents that are almost incomprehensible.

The simple set by Eugene Lee is flexible enough to suggest contrasting sides of the postwar world. But the real emotions come from Matt Acheson's subtle and marvelous marionettes, especially Anne, who haunts Sid with the face that somehow looks like a girl and the woman she might have become. Sid's wife is jealous of her. In this, we understand why.