A late curtain across town slowed me down, and almost made me miss a remarkable show last Sunday, May 16th, at Kansas City’s Gem Theater: Anne & Emmet. I’m SO glad I went ahead, even though I’ll need another chance to catch the first ten minutes.
I was immediately surprised to be joining a such a large audience, comprising large contingents of blacks and Jews along with fellow travelers on the road to social justice, for this was our subject. Turning out audiences is a persistent problem in Kansas City, so I look forward to talking more with the organizers about their approach: they clearly did a great job!
And what a rich program was on offer. The playwright, Janet Langhart Cohen, was on hand, as was the director, Hinton Battle, to witness outstanding performances by Lindsay Kyler as Anne Frank and Leo Breckenridge as Emmett Till. Cohen engaged these historic figures in imaginary dialogue about their fates as teen-aged martyrs of the European Holocaust and the slower, steadier, centuries-long holocaust of racist violence that has plagued the United States.
In the process, Cohen lays the foundation for healing between American blacks and Jews, whose long collaboration as committed, visionary organizers brought the NAACP’s historic victories throughout the 20th century Civil Rights Movement’s most successful phase, before late-’60s divisions began to tear these two communities apart. Cohen’s play eloquently portrays the unspeakable horrors of lynching and domestic terrorism against American blacks, in parallel with the better-known story of the Holocaust (recently questioned by a new generation of know-nothings). Recorded narration by voice-of-God Morgan Freeman and tastefully handled, but of course horrifying images of both holocausts helped establish the larger historical backdrop.
In little more than an hour, the play’s dialogue not only drew out Anne Frank’s and Emmett Till’s stories, both specific and general, and their many parallels; it also engaged their two immortal souls in a retrospective assessment of the meaning of their lives and deaths, and speculations about future paths to healing and justice. Much of the audience gasped and applauded (with considerable squirming among the people seated right in front of me) at these two characters’ observation that European reparations to Holocaust survivors realized a goal held by many in the black community (not to mention Native Americans). The audience is left with provocative questions about the prospects for addressing cultural divisions of every kind.
Such was the rich banquet of food for thought in this outstanding one-act play, repeated the following night in Topeka, in commemoration of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Then came dessert: a panel comprising the playwright, as well as her husband (former Secretary of Defense, Sen. William Cohen), the playwright, the two actors and Cheryl Henderson Brown of Topeka’s Brown Foundation, with quite a number of comments and questions from the audience.
Most remarkable moment of all, for me personally, came when Eva Mozes Kor, author of Surviving the Angel of Death, was invited up from the audience to join the onstage panel: As a German Jewish twin, she survived the horrifying experimentation of Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele’s in 1944. She recounted her decision, when Nazi doctors, dismissed her as certainly dying in two weeks’ time, to accept the her death. “Until you forgive those who have hurt you,” she said to the assembled, “you will continue be enslaved.”
I left the theater more hopeful than I have felt in years at our human power to heal even our most egregious failings, when fear leads leads so many of us down the path of animal hatred.
For more information about the play, visit the “Anne & Emmett” site
“Anne & Emmett” was presented at the American Jazz Museum’s Gem Theater in conjunction with the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, the Negro League Baseball Musuem, Topeka’s Brown Foundation and the Jewish Community Relations Bureau, with underwriting from BlueCross/BlueShield of Kansas City; Collective Brands, Inc.; Hallmark; the Sprint Foundation; the Earl J. & Leona K. Tranin Fund; and Tension Envelope.
Kansas City Performs! 