"Now, They Are Content With Burning My Books"
On crafting a story out of history
When I first decided to write a decades-spanning historical epic play about Freud’s daughter in 2020, I suspected it would be difficult to get anyone interested in performing the piece. It’s three hours long, has a cast of nine and comes with a pile of content warnings. Add in the general difficulty of staging anything new in the wake of the pandemic theater backlog, and it isn’t surprising I had more or less shelved the project after completing a first draft.
But now, An Interpretation of Anna is finally having its first staged reading!
This isn’t exactly news, per se. I applied for this opportunity two years ago and found out I’d been selected last summer, when my reaction was essentially, “June 2024 doesn’t exist in my mind yet, but sure, sounds good.”
(The reading is on Sunday, June 16 in NYC, and I’ll happily share more information for anyone interested in attending as it gets closer to the actual date.)
Because I wrote Anna in 2020-21 and haven’t worked on it much since, returning to the play has been a fascinating re-exploration. Some of these lines are really good, past me! But as I’ve been reading over my early process notes, I’ve been especially interested in A) all the timelines I wrote out trying to determine which historical events would make it into the play and B) everything I thought I would include but ultimately didn’t.
So for today’s essay, I thought I’d talk about how I turned 15 years of dense historical material into a compelling, character-driven narrative, and more broadly, how I transform history into story.
I used to be afraid of writing historically-based fiction because I was intimidated by the research involved. What if I got something wrong or misinterpreted the facts at hand? What if someone called me out for my mistakes?
But as I’ve gotten into it, I’ve found that I love writing historical adaptations. My first historical play was The Young Ladies of the Class of 1902 of Wesleyan University Present, “As You Like It,” which I’ve written about here before; it’s the play I’m in the process of adapting into a novel. An Interpretation of Anna was my next full-length project, kicked off as a response to a rising tide of antisemitic violence in NYC in late 2019.
Like most of my writing, however, the germ of an idea had been twisting around in my mind for years beforehand. With my purely fictional works, the scene that often comes to me first is the beginning of the story, and then I let the characters lead me where they will, but with historical drama, I find it helpful to ask myself:
1. What is the moment in time I want to drive the story toward?
Most likely, that’s the original event that got me interested in these characters to begin with, as well as what will end up being the climax of the piece. For Anna, that was Anna Freud rescuing her whole family, including Sigmund, and others from the Vienna psychoanalyst community from the Nazis descending upon Austria in 1938.
Then, we backtrack. How did we get here? Or, more specifically:
2. What key events before that moment call out to me?
Diving headfirst into the research, what feels so theatrical it needs to be in a play or so fascinating I’m desperate to know more? Anna Freud didn’t just escape the Nazis in a general sense; she was actually captured and interrogated by the Gestapo. At one point, Nazi soldiers visit the Freud household and the Freuds get them to go away by dumping their life savings out on a table for the soldiers to take.
Sigmund Freud has a really chilling quote, “In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books,” that I knew I had to include. Anna’s nephew is almost captured by Nazis while fleeing Berlin and shows up at the Freuds’ to recount the tale while Sigmund’s beloved dog is having puppies.
I could go on for a while, clearly.
3. What connects the dots between those events?
What major events fill in the gaps between the moments I want to feature, and what are the common themes that arise between them? Anna Freud, a leading world expert in child psychoanalysis, founds a school for her patients with her two best friends, and she’s also writing books during this time, so career is an important theme for her. Those three women functionally co-raise her nephew Ernest and all have their separate, complex relationships with motherhood, so clearly that’s important.
There’s a running thread throughout Anna’s life, in fact, about despite the fact that she dedicates her life and career to children, she’s never had any of her own, so why is that (and what does it mean for her sexuality)? And then also the influence of the Nazi party is growing all around them, so what does it mean to be a financially privileged, atheist Jew in that world?
4. Who are the important people and relationships in the story?
Unlike mediums like novels or film, where having someone show up briefly just for the sake of the plot is more common, when writing theater I like to give every actor something to do and their own story they walk through as the play progresses.
Standard playwriting “rules” also apply; if each character has their own objective that they’re trying to achieve, where can I insert opportunities for those objectives to come in conflict with one another? Better yet, where can I already see this happening in history?
An Interpretation of Anna is all about Anna Freud’s personal relationships with other people, which are infused with both love and conflict. There’s Anna vs. Sigmund, of course—how Sigmund thinks and writes about women is a natural source of tension when the functional heir to his psychoanalytic empire is his own daughter. Anna raising the son of her older sister and bitterest childhood rival leads to her rehashing that conflict, which is how Sophie ended up as a character in the play despite being dead during the years it takes place. The big open question of Anna’s sexuality means that Dorothy Burlingham, her “professional” “partner,” is also a critical character in Anna’s story.
5. What is the frame of the story? What are its outer bounds?
For Anna, I struggled with the length of the story I wanted to tell. A general best practice for many forms of narrative writing is to start your writing as late in the story as you can get away with to grip your audience immediately (that’s in medias res, if you remember high school English class). And I originally tried dropping us in with the Freuds a few years later than what ultimately made it into the draft but found I was missing a true inciting incident to kick things off.
So let’s step back to the question of key relationships. Because Anna’s relationship with and therefore conflict with both Sigmund and Sophie essentially begin at birth, those aren’t helpful for narrowing down the scope of the play. Nor is “rising antisemitism” which is often subtle at the start and so doesn’t give us the bang we want to start the story with.
That leaves Dorothy, and indeed I found it made the most sense to introduce Dorothy to the Freuds at the same time that I introduce her to the audience, as the relationship between Anna and Dorothy really is the heart of the story.
I also originally thought the play would conclude with Sigmund’s death, a natural endpoint, but ultimately I wrapped it up earlier with the end of another relationship I haven’t mentioned yet: that of the entire cast of characters with the city of Vienna and the Freud home, where the bulk of the action has taken place. “What does it mean to have to leave home?” is another common question in all forms of storytelling and a comfortable place to leave one’s audience.
6. What other themes can I sprinkle throughout the story?
These aren’t necessarily the key moments or drive the plot forward but provide opportunities for character exploration, world building and so on. In An Interpretation of Anna, those include how so many of Freud’s little ideas have inserted themselves into modern culture despite the fact that we find all of his actual theories to be hogwash these days, what it means for psychoanalysis to be a “Jewish science” and the Freud family’s deep and abiding love of dogs. (Of course, it is me after all.)
7. Conversely, what ideas fall away as interesting but not relevant to the story I’m trying to tell?
I could talk your ear off about Anna’s trans cousin Tom, the fascinating historical personage of Princess Marie Bonaparte, what it means that Freud thought of himself as King Lear and Anna as Cordelia and so much more. Even Anna’s key professional rival Melanie Klein ultimately fell by the wayside simply due to not being interconnected enough with the remaining characters; the story I end up telling is very emplaced in Vienna, and Melanie doesn’t spend enough time there to make it into the tale.
What remains is a deeply intricate play about A) motherhood, B) queer relationships, C) fathers and daughters, D) women’s careers, E) grief and F) antisemitism (and yes I have a chart in my notebook that diagrams all that out). I think that’s enough, don’t you?
Of course, I haven’t heard the whole piece read out loud from start to finish yet, so I suppose it’s a bit premature to say this all works in its current form. Maybe one subplot feels totally superfluous, or something else is obviously missing. Maybe trying to fit all this into one play was overly ambitious of me.
But New York’s had plenty of three-hour sweeping historical Jewish plays lately, so clearly someone’s interested in them. Now it’s time to add mine to the canon.