Roger Guenveur Smith’s ‘Otto Frank’ was a meditation on the dark history of hatred

A review by Carol Canter with photos by Jay Yamada.

The 2022 hour spent with “Otto Frank,” was performed by Roger Guenveur Smith in a solo show at the Magic Theatre. It was agonizing and mesmerizing, painful and enlightening, and all too real. While in tough times like ours today I may tend to turn away from “too much reality,” I had been so captivated in my youth by The Diary of Anne Frank that I grabbed the chance to “get to know” her father Otto Frank, the family’s sole survivor.

The play was a conversation with Frank’s younger daughter Anne, who perished along with her sister Margot in the Nazi death camp Bergen Belsen in 1945. Their mother Edith perished at Auschwitz.

Seated at a table, microphone in hand, Smith weaves together a history of hatred through the centuries in barely a whisper. The set is minimalist, the lighting low, the music ethereal, the voice incantatory. We were transfixed, as we are led to very dark places — the Middle Passage of slave ships from Africa, Japanese internment camps, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. where a guard was killed by a white supremacist in 2009, and to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. That such hate crimes continue, even escalate, long after the death of Otto Frank in 1980, makes this performance piece tragically timeless and all too relevant.

Poignant moments stood out. Black GIs weeping as they came face to face with the horror of a concentration camp they had come to liberate. A WW 2 veteran explains to Frank why his segregated Japanese-American 442nd Regiment Combat Team became the most decorated unit for its size, embodying the slogan “Go For Broke,” even while their families at home were interned.

Berkeley-born writer/performer Roger Guenveur Smith, speaks of the origins of his OTTO FRANK:

“I was invited to Amsterdam to perform a solo piece called ‘Rodney King’ and the first place that I went was the Anne Frank house. And I was able to absorb there what I had only ever been able to imagine: this man returning from the war, to silence. To an empty room that had been full. That experience that Rodney King — of all people- took me to has continued to influence me and hopefully to inspire and to bless this particular project. And we know a lot about Anne Frank, his daughter. But we don’t know a lot about him, Otto Frank, her father. The survivor who lost his wife and two daughters in the Nazi Death Camps. It was he who gave Anne that diary on her 13th birthday and it was he who impossibly received it again. It was he who struggled for months to read it. And it was he that decided to share it with the world.” (From an interview at the Temple Israel of Hollywood.)

Smith is known for a prolific career in TV and film, highlighted by his long collaboration with Spike Lee for over 30 years in films from Malcolm X to Do the Right Thing. His solo performance pieces have embodied Frederick Douglas, Bob Marley, and others. Two, A Huey P. Newton Story and Rodney King, were filmed by Spike Lee and released as telefilms for streaming. Smith’s longtime award-winning collaboration with singer-songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson, creator of the musical collective Chocolate Genius, continues here in the current production of Otto Frank.

Visit the website for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam here: https://www.annefrank.org/en/

For more on Amsterdam where Anne Frank lived, visit here: https://medium.com/batw-travel-stories/amsterdam-bikes-bridges-and-boats-99c1b6283f6e

What: Campo Santo, the Magic Theatre’s new Home Resident Company presents the premiere run in a limited engagement of Otto Frank, created and performed by Roger Guenveur Smith, with live sound design by Marc Anthony Thompson.

Dates: March 12–27, 2022.

Venue was: The Magic Theatre, Fort Mason: 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, 3rd Floor. San Francisco, CA. 94123.