Playwright Rinne Groff on Her 15-Year Odyssey With Compulsion

About the Author:
As a founding member of inventive theater group Elevator Repair Service, which brought the acclaimed Gatz to the Public Theater last fall, playwright Rinne Groff is a lover of collaborative theater making, and it shows in the varied types of work she chooses to do. Her plays include The Ruby Sunrise, Orange Lemon Egg Canary and Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat; she’s written the book for musicals like Saved! and In the Bubble; and she's been a staff writer for the Showtime hit Weeds. Groff has been crafting her latest creation, Compulsion, about a man determined to bring the story of Anne Frank to the stage, for more than 15 years. As the play readies to begin previews at off-Broadway's Public Theater in a production starring Mandy Patinkin, Groff took time to let Broadway.com know why this story is one she’s been waiting well over a decade to tell.

It’s rare for me to know with certainty the exact date that the idea for any given play came into my head, but in the case of Compulsion, I do: September 17, 1995. On that lovely Sunday, while reading The New York Times, I came across Frank Rich’s review of a new non-fiction book by Lawrence Graver entitled An Obsession with Anne Frank. The book related the tale a man who felt he had earned the right, for various reasons, to adapt The Dairy of Anne Frank for the Broadway stage, and of what happened on the journey to realize his goal. Intrigued by this story, I carefully cut out the newsprint and put the article in a plastic folder in which I kept “ideas.”

Years later, when someone asked me, “How long did it take to write this play?” I could go back to that same plastic folder and find that yellowing piece of newsprint and, in order to answer the question, simply read the date printed at the top and do the math. How strange to have so literal an answer. Far more strange, however, is the fact that on that blessed Sunday morning when I cut out Mr. Rich’s review and decided that I was going to write a play about this subject matter, I had not yet written a single complete play in my life!

I had been making theater for a while at that point. As a founding member of Elevator Repair Service, a collaborative theater company, I was a player in coming up with ideas for shows, devising scenes, and figuring out through discussion and rehearsal how those scenes could be wrought into a theater piece; and I do consider that time in my life as the beginning of my playwriting career. But it wasn’t the solo process of writing. It wasn’t the act of typing out a script on a computer screen all the way through to “The End.” The closest I had come to that type of thing was scripting a bunch of interlocking monologues which I had presented at a series called Yikes! at the old Cucaracha Theater.

So it seems to me miraculous, when I think back on it, that on September 17, 1995, I was able to discern two things simultaneously: 1) that this subject matter would make for a good Rinne Groff play someday (even though a Rinne Groff play wasn’t a thing that existed yet), and 2) that I had to learn a lot more about playwriting (and maybe life, too; a lot more about life) before I was ready to start writing it.

In those 15-plus years since “inception” if you will, I did major research about Meyer Levin—the historical figure on whom the main character in my play is based—reading his novels and those of his wife Tereska Torres, who wrote brilliantly about many things including her husband’s travails, exploring non-fiction literary sources, interviewing people, and checking out archives. I, also, in that time, went to grad school, wrote at least 10 other plays, four musicals, and a season on a TV show, started teaching graduate and undergraduate students, fell in love, fell out of love, fell in love, got my heart broken, fell in love, broke someone else’s heart, fell in love for good, got married, made beautiful baby girls with my beloved, ate, slept, read, saw plays, and did all the other things that people do.

Somehow towards the end of those 15 years—with the great gift of a commission from the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep—I was able to write this play called Compulsion, and now it’s about to have its New York debut. Some things take time. Their own sweet time.