With strings attached, Compulsion compells

It's so incredibly exciting to be enthralled by someone or something. In the case of Rinne Groff's Compulsion at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, it's someone and something.

The world-premiere production (in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre, where the play ran earlier this year, and The Public Theater in New York, where the play goes next) is ostensibly a roman a clef about the life of Meyer Levin, the journalist and novelist most famous for the novel Compulsion, his fictionalized spin on the Leopold and Loeb murders. Levin's stand-in here is Sid Silver, also Jewish, also from Chicago, also married to a French woman, also obsessed with Anne Frank and her diary.