![]() It was scheduled to be at New York’s Public Theater for the Under the Radar Festival in January, but that festival was cancelled due to Omicron. “I was reading all I could, trying to get a sense of how to do this theatrically.”įrank performed Otto Frank at these Northeastern schools, but the Magic Theatre is the first time the show has had a full run. “It was a visceral experience,” Smith said. He also saw some artifacts including Ziplock bags full of children’s shoes. Along with exploring documents and reading in-depth, Smith was able to talk to some scholars about Frank. To research Frank’s life, Smith spent time at several East Coast universities with Holocaust and genocide centers-Keene State in New Hampshire, the University of Maine at Augusta, Holy Cross in Massachusetts. When her father was the only one to come back, the employee gave it to him. “It took him months to read through the tears,” Smith said. “For me being there, I could imagine Otto coming back after the war having known he’d lost his wife, but he hoped his daughters would return, and of course they didn’t.”Īn employee had noticed the diary and kept it, hoping to give it back to Anne. “When we read the diary, we have a sense of the claustrophobia, but when you go there, you really feel that eight people were living in this small space and had to be very quiet and you can’t flush the toilet or run water or raise your voice above a whisper or turn on the lights during the daytime,” Smith said. ![]() When he went to Amsterdam to perform it, the first place he visited there was the house where the Franks hid out with another family. ![]() He’d been thinking of doing a show on Frank, but when Rodney King died in 2012, he focused on creating a one-man performance about King. As the father of two daughters himself, as Frank was, Smith was also personally interested in the man. Smith calls Frank, who gave his daughter the diary she wrote in for her 13 th birthday, a “mysterious person,” and he wanted to know more about him. “With this I’m thinking about the weight of his psyche and driving that man’s energy down into that table and keeping the performance as still and quiet as possible.”Īs he has since 1992, when they made Christopher Columbus together, Smith is working with musician Mark Anthony Thompson, who does the live sound design for the piece. With Rodney King, I call it kind of a ‘Soul Train’ kabuki,” he said. With Huey Newton, even though I was sitting in a chair, I was never not in motion. “A lot of my work has been very physically executed. He will sit at a desk with a microphone in front of him. “He was born in chaos,” Smith says about Frank.īut for the solo show Otto Frank, opening at the Magic Theatre on March 12, Smith wants to do something different than he’s done with previous subjects-stay still. Smith sees some connection between the subject of his latest show, Otto Frank, father of famous diarist Anne Frank, and King and Newton. Lee told the Los Angeles Times that Smith does what Mark Twain and other great storytellers do-he humanizes people who have been made into icons or demons. Newton Story, about the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and Rodney King, which takes on police brutality in 1991 Los Angeles. Lee, in turn, has worked with Smith on some of his solo theater shows like the Obie Award- winning A Huey P. Actor, director, and writer Roger Guenvuer Smith has appeared in many of his friend Spike Lee’s movies, including Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X.
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