He has written and starred in plays about abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Black Panther co-founder Huey P. You reverse that imagery and you see people like the Franks, herded onto trains to Westerbork,” and then off to death camps. “To see struggling to get onto trains to alleged safety, and denied that opportunity. “Doing this piece at this moment, it’s fraught with extraordinarily disturbing imagery,” he says. Smith sees in history’s cruel milestones an intersectional aspect that defies time and space, including what’s happening today in Ukraine. RELATED: A new Anne Frank Center aims to reshape racism through Holocaust education even though both took place long after Otto Frank’s death in 1980. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The play touches on other tragedies -such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the 2009 murder of a Black security guard at the U.S.
We want people’s imaginations to be energized, and for people to walk out of the theater and look at this moment in a new way.” “We don’t want people leaving the theater saying, ‘Isn’t it horrible what happened back then?’ That’s a knee-jerk performance that will last two seconds. “In many ways, this piece is an imagined flow of Otto Frank’s life and beyond,” Smith says from his Los Angeles home. But in the play, Otto doesn’t stop with the family’s ordeal or the Holocaust. The disaster that befell the Franks haunts Otto, who seems to yearn for an absolution that can never come. Largely addressing his late daughter Anne, Otto speaks in poetic, dirge-like tones about a shattered world. Smith’s Otto sits at a long desk before a microphone, as if he were testifying at a hearing. Now, he is excited about opening his one-man show at the Magic before live audiences. “Otto Frank,” written and performed by Smith, with a musical score performed live by Marc Anthony Thompson, opens March 12 for a three-weekend run at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.Īfter preparing to premiere the play at the Under the Radar Festival in New York a few years ago, Smith had to hit the brakes with “Otto Frank” due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent shutdown of theaters nationwide. But Smith’s play focuses on Otto, the Frank family’s sole survivor and the man who recovered, edited and published the diary that changed the world. Over the years since Anne’s diary was published in 1947, there have been multiple works for stage and screen about Anne. For actor-playwright Roger Guenveur Smith, visiting the secret annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years moved him so much, he wrote a play. No one steps inside the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam without being moved.
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