Shared from the 3/19/2022 San Francisco Chronicle eEdition

‘Otto Frank’ explores human capacity for evil

Picture
Jay Yamada

Roger Guenveur Smith uncloaks human suffering and depravity across the centuries throughout the globe in “Otto Frank” at the Magic Theatre in S.F.

Picture

If his solo show “Otto Frank” were courtroom testimony, Roger Guenveur Smith’s hypnotic voice and grave demeanor would command a jury’s attention.

Seated at a wooden desk and leaning into a microphone at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where the Campo Santo production opened on Saturday, March 12, the Berkeley-born actor does indeed invoke the solemnity of a trial. In a structure that both focuses and blunts the evening’s dramatic impact, the creator/performer is witness and prosecutor, defendant and judge.

The case, as it were, centers on the titular Otto Frank, father of the young diarist Anne Frank who died at age 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 during the Holocaust. Smith explores Otto’s story and embodies him in an actor’s feat of singleminded control, his eyes ablaze with feeling and his body all but frozen in place.

Otto lays bares his grief at the loss of his family (his wife and other daughter also died at the hands of the Nazis). He confesses his survivor’s guilt. He acknowledges his “Teutonic rage” and “bourgeois civility.” He defends himself from the charge that he exploited Anne’s writing or “deracinated” the diary.

As the hour-long piece unfolds, “Otto Frank” spreads out a cloak of human suffering and depravity from across the centuries and around the globe. The slaves’ Middle Passage, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Vietnam War and hate-crime killings in Pittsburgh; Tulsa, Okla.; and Christchurch, New Zealand, are raised, most of them in somber, telegraphic catalogs.

However forcefully Smith delivers them, in his deliberate, deep-voiced cadences, these passages feel like categorical declarations. Audiences are not juries, tasked with toting up evidence. They want to be engaged in an intimate visceral way. When “Otto Frank” does that, the show delivers a deeper charge — and it happens in different ways.

One is a story Smith tells, as if Otto (who died in 1980) had time-traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where a guard was killed by a white supremacist in 2009. Another is a poignant detail about the photographs of movie stars and other celebrities that decorated Anne Frank’s wall in Amsterdam; one, apparently, depicted a white man in blackface. Here, and in the teary faces of Black GIs during the World War II liberation, the script sounds the haunting, race-spanning chords of history.

In one wrenching bit of physical business, Smith’s Otto muses on what it might feel like to dance. A liberating pulse ripples through his arms, only to perish on the desktop, where his hands remain rooted in place. Smith, who created a memorably kinetic solo show about Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton at the Magic Theatre three decades ago, has almost literally tied his hands and feet here. Never leaving his chair and for the most part maintaining a fixed posture, he’s like a Beckett character rooted in place. The early portions of the script have that writer’s attenuated spare quality.

Marc Anthony Thompson’s sound design of drone-like thrums, sirens and a few startling alterations of Smith’s voice, enhances without intruding. So does the subtle lighting by Alejandro Acosta, after an original design by Kirk Wilson, which heightens the sense of Otto’s timeless isolation.

In its theatrical austerity, “Otto Frank” is a confession without a catharsis, an existential meditation on the human capacity for evil. It offers no easy consolations or uplift. Fittingly the music Otto mentions — Billie Holiday, Bach, Scott Joplin — goes unheard, as if it were locked away inside him.

As “Otto Frank” ends in darkness and premonition, time past becomes time present. The audience left the theater on Saturday to the strains of Ukraine’s national anthem.

Steven Winn is The Chronicle’s former arts and culture critic.

“Otto Frank”: Created and and performed by Roger Guenveur Smith. Sound design by Marc Anthony Thompson. One hour. Through March 27. Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd., S.F. $20-$70, sliding scale. 415-441-8822. www.magictheatre.org

See this article in the e-Edition Here
Edit Privacy