Natalie Portman goes to Broadway as Anne Frank, the most famous voice of the Holocaust

Sitting across from Natalie Portman can be a disconcerting experience. How often do you meet perfection? And Portman's 16-year-old face is perfect. She's already been hailed as "the next Audrey Hepburn" and "the new Elizabeth Taylor." In reality she's the only Natalie Portman, a kid so nice you think how lucky--and smart--her parents are. Now she's on Broadway in "The Diary of Anne Frank," as the girl who hid from the Nazis with seven other Jews for two years in an Amsterdam attic before they were discovered and shipped to the death camps, where she died at 14. "I feel very close to her," says Natalie, who explains that her father lost his grandparents and a granduncle in the Holocaust.

Good credentials to play Anne Frank, but onstage Portman's chief credentials are her hair-trigger spontaneity and the sweetness that remains even when she plays Anne being mean to her mother or mercilessly teasing the teenage Peter, from whom she receives her first (and last) gingerly kiss. Holed up in the "secret annex" with her parents and sister, along with Peter and his parents, the Van Daans, and the dentist Mr. Dussel, Anne uses her diary to cultivate the gifts that would have made her a major writer. The most famous document to come out of the Holocaust, the diary has sold 25 million copies in 55 languages. The play, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.

For all its success, the play has always aroused controversy. Its detractors claim that it bleaches out the Jewish element in favor of a bland "universality." In this revival, playwright Wendy Kesselman has restored some of this material, as well as elements concerning Anne's burgeoning sexuality and tensions with her mother, which were originally edited out by Anne's father, Otto Frank (played here by George Hearn).

The result is a better play than the original. But the play's problem remains the same. Reading the diary, you are inside Anne's mind and eyes. Onstage Anne is part of a drama that sometimes appears as a familycom with Holocaust noises offstage. There is still desperation and fear as eight people jam together in a cramped space, rubbing nerves raw, subsisting on beans and rotting potatoes, starting at every sound. The diary packs such power because everything is refracted through the revelatory precocity of a child who's not just recording events but discovering herself.

The play's "realism" robs it of this deeper reality. It would take theatrical genius matching Anne Frank's own to get at this deep core of tragedy. Lacking that, the play becomes a popular representation of an amazing and heartbreaking book. This is nothing to sneeze at; 40 years later, the audience still reacts with tears, leavened by tender laughter. James Lapine's staging is sensitive, perhaps a bit too careful, like a conductor making sure he doesn't over -personalize the music. The performances seem a few volts short of ultimate impact, except for Portman and Linda Lavin, whose Mrs. Van Daan is a pathetic counterfoil to Anne. The child's vanities are the excess of her hopes and appetites, the woman's are the vestiges of her disappointments and regrets.

Portman's adorable performance is largely a matter of instincts; she's still really a beginner, with just a few movies: notably as a hit man's 12-year-old sidekick in "The Professional" and Al Pacino's suicidal daughter in "Heat." Before Anne Frank, she filmed George Lucas's "Star Wars" prequel as the Young Queen who becomes the mother of Luke Skywalker. Still, "I don't know if this is what I want to do the rest of my life," she says. Portman (a privacy-protecting stage name) "loves learning" at a public high school on New York's Long Island. Born in Jerusalem, she speaks Hebrew and is studying French and Japanese. If there's a case for a universal Anne Frank, the Jewish Portman makes it best. "You want your message to reach as many people as possible. You don't want to say 'Don't do this to the Jews' but 'Don't do this to anyone'." Confronting Portman, the argument becomes academic. She brings to Anne Frank the supreme value. Life.