Photo caption: PHOTO ART FROM “Frank Otto,” a one-man retrospective created and performed by veteran actor Roger Guenveur Smith.
After an explosive, heart-wrenching and powerful performance in his one-man show “Rodney King” a few years back, actor, director and writer Roger Guenveur Smith comes to Chicago this weekend in his portrayal of Otto Frank, in a new work inspired by the father of diarist Anne Frank.
Smith is known for acting in many of Spike Lee’s films, including “Get On The Bus,” “A Huey P. Newton Story,” which earned him an Obie Award for his spot-on portrayal of the Black Panther leader, “He Got Game” and “Malcolm X,” among others. He told the Crusader that the character of “Smiley” in Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” was totally improvised and not written into the script. Smiley is a young man who dances to the beat of his own drum, who tries to sell pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. His role is pivotal in juxtaposing the two iconic figures and the disparate themes of violence and non-violence.
Aside from his collaborations with Lee, he has to date at least 100 film and television acting appearances, and he’s best captured on screen as being the coolest brother in the room or the brother who could knock your head off your shoulders with a few minutes of acerbic dialogue.
Smith has recently portrayed champions in the African American community, such as TRM Howard, a wealthy Mississippi benefactor and physician who, in 1972, founded the multi-million-dollar Friendship Medical Center on the South Side. It was the largest privately-owned Black clinic in Chicago.
Take a look at Roger Guenveur Smith discussing Dr. TRM Howard, as he talks about the 2022 film “Till.”:
Smith’s portrayal of Howard was made whole in the 2022 film “Till,” where Dr. Howard welcomed Mamie Till-Mobley and her supporters after Emmett Till’s horrific mutilation in that racist state.
Howard was an important physician in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the oldest Black city in Mississippi. After being terrorized by the KKK and racist whites after the Till trial, he relocated to Chicago, ran for political office and finally built his health centers.
Smith also played NAACP attorney Walter White in 2017’s “Marshall,” a film about the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Many of Smith’s acting choices seem to place him in historical events—portraying commanding figures.
And “Otto Frank” is just a continuation of his indelible onstage gravitas. He further shared with the Crusader, in a delightful and educational phone interview, about his career and this latest project—which also examines themes of evil and suffering such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War and the Tulsa Riots.
He said that he chose this subject after a trip to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. “I came to Otto Frank through a ‘Rodney King’ performance that I did in Amsterdam. I was completely moved to be in that place [the Museum]. I couldn’t stop imagining this man coming back [home] and losing his wife and praying that he still had his daughters.”
History tells us that Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager, and her family and a few others hid in an attic in Amsterdam during the German Occupation in the early 40s. Over approximately two years, Anne kept a diary. They were discovered and forcibly removed from the attic in September 1944. In February 1945, after having been sent to a concentration camp, as opposed to immediate, certain death in an extermination camp, Anne and her sister, Margot, reportedly died of typhus.
Otto Frank was the only member of the group of eight who survived. He was liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet troops in early January 1945. He returned home to find none of his family alive—but he did have his daughter’s diary.
And it is from this grieving father’s position that Smith pulls from to present this poignant, sad story.
Smith’s intimate meditation, scored live by longtime artistic partner, songwriter, composer and musician Marc Anthony Thompson, illuminates “our present moment through a rigorous interrogation of our not-so-distant past.” Smith’s “Otto Frank” addresses his daughter beyond her time and his own, navigating his loss as the only survivor of his immediate family, and negotiating his subsequent service to the living and the dead as the steward of her work.
The diary was a gift that he had given to Anne. “It’s a very deep and dark psychological journey that Otto went through,” Smith said. Otto lived to be 91 and was encouraged to not pay too much attention to the dead, while ignoring the living.
“He was in a precarious balance the rest of his life, questioning how to simultaneously serve the living and the dead,” Smith said.
He noted that it’s a good focus for this drama and that, “It’s in the tradition of the work that I do. There are these contradictions.”
As for Lee’s films, Smith said the most memorable are the ones that were adopted to films from his creations—“Rodney King” and “A Huey P. Newton Story.”
And even though the Frank’s story is 80-year-old history, Smith, a Berkeley, California, native, told San Francisco’s KQED, “In this particular international moment, what he brings to the table is extraordinary and extraordinarily vital. It is necessary — this conversation that [Otto Frank] has with his daughter beyond her time and beyond his time as well.”
And finally, the actor added a personal note about “Otto Frank,” saying that even though it’s a one-man show, he’s not alone on the stage. “I’m bringing it all back, and the people in the audience, they are bringing their people too. We are all breathing the same air. And it’s far from a one-man show.”
“Otto Frank” will be presented in four performances: Thursday, October 5, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, October 6, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 7, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for Performing and Media Arts, Chicago Campus, Abbott Hall, 710 N. DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
For tickets, visit https://tinyurl.com/53cjy8rn or call the box office at 847-491-7282.
