Interview: Roger Guenveur Smith of OTTO FRANK at Campo Santo & Magic Theatre Explores the Enduring Relevance of the Holocaust Survivor

The Magic Theatre's first Home Resident Company, Campo Santo, is presenting the premiere run of Otto Frank, a new performance piece created and performed by Obie, Peabody and Bessie Award winner Roger Guenveur Smith, with an original score and live sound by Marc Anthony Thompson. The piece had been scheduled to run at The Public Theatre in New York this past January as part of their Under the Radar festival, but unfortunately had to be cancelled due to the Omicron surge. Magic Theatre Artistic Director Sean San José describes Otto Frank as "a piece both outside and within our own moment. It is a song, a poetic reverie carved from curiosity, sadness, rage, and an abiding empathy. Smith inhabits the father of Anne Frank as he weaves through time, navigating loss, his own motivations as steward and creator of her legacy, and the terrible sense of tragedy in his time and our own."

Guenveur Smith has developed a unique and emotionally intense performance style that employs spoken word, historical fact and jazzlike riffs, accompanied by a restless physicality. While his works often embody well-known figures from our collective culture, they are never exercises in nostalgia or hagiography. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he has written and performed solo performance pieces deeply rooted in history, advocacy and compassion about such varied individuals as Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and Jean Michel Basquiat. In 2001, his solo performance piece A Huey P. Newton Story was filmed by Spike Lee, winning him a Peabody award. In 2018, his Rodney King was also filmed by Spike Lee and released on Netflix.

Guenveur Smith made his film debut in Lee's School Daze, which began a long abiding friendship and collaboration. Smith has gone on to appear in many of Lee's best-known films, including Malcolm X, Get On the Bus, He Got Game, Summer of Sam and the seminal Do the Right Thing. His extensive film credits also include working with many other celebrated filmmakers, including Bill Duke (Deep Cover), the late John Singleton (Poetic Justice), Abel Ferrara (King of New York), Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou), and Ridley Scott (American Gangster). On television, he has appeared in scores of popular television shows since the 1990s, including A Different World, Murphy Brown, Oz, All My Children, K Street, Third Watch, New York Undercover and Black Jesus. He is a series regular on the upcoming third season of the legal drama All Rise for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and Hulu.

I spoke with Guenveur Smith by phone last week from his home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. (For the record, his middle name is pronounced Ghen-vehr, sounds like "been there.") We talked about the genesis of Otto Frank, his longtime collaborations with Spike Lee and Marc Anthony Thompson, his significant history with both Campo Santo and Magic Theatre, and his illustrious classmates at Yale. Guenveur Smith is a fascinating conversationalist with a propensity for speaking in deeply thoughtful, complex sentences that often go in unanticipated directions. He is very deliberate and careful with his words, but I never got the impression he was being cagey or censoring his thoughts. He is simply someone who understands the power of language and strives to say exactly what he means. I should also point out that he has a playful and exceptionally dry sense of humor. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to create Otto Frank?

I think a great curiosity, I think an ignorance, I think the idea of him being the father of two daughters and having lost two daughters, and I am the father of two daughters. I had a very special opportunity to visit the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, and oddly it was Rodney King who took me to Amsterdam because I was doing my solo performance Rodney King in the festival there. I had an opportunity to go to that house, and I was very moved and inspired.

I thought of this man coming back from the war, knowing that he had lost his wife, not knowing that he had lost his daughters, hoping that his daughters were still alive and finding out that he had lost them as well. And then he is presented with this diary that had been presented from him to his daughter Anne, for her 13th birthday. While they were in hiding, she had given it to him every night for safekeeping and he had not betrayed her trust. He didn't read it; he just locked it away in his briefcase. It was hoped of course that everyone would come back after the war and that Anne would be reunited with her diary, but she was not. One can only imagine the difficulty with which her father went through those pages. And the great dilemma then of absorbing it for himself and for their surviving family and trying to decide in what way he was going to share it with the world - if he was going to share it with the world at all.

I think he deferred to his daughter's ambition. She was an ambitious young writer who wanted to be read, wanted to be heard. He then becomes the purveyor of her brilliance through publication, multiple translations, adaptations into radio plays, the stage play and the film. It is only superseded by the Bible in non-fiction popularity, and the diary itself continues to inspire, particularly, young people all over the world and in scores of languages. Otto lived a very long and productive life and remarried, to another survivor. His step-daughter, Eva Schloss, who is a contemporary of Anne and knew her as a child, continues to write and lecture in her early nineties. I actually heard her speak not long ago in Los Angeles and one of the most memorable things she said was that she had told Otto at one point that he was focusing too much on the dead and ignoring the living, that he had grandchildren to whom he should be paying attention.

So those are kind of the foundations for the piece. But like all of my pieces, Otto Frank does not exist simply as history or as an exercise in nostalgia, or something that people can come and see and then say, "Wasn't it horrible what happened way back then?" I want this piece to resonate in our present moment. My Otto speaks to his daughter from beyond her lifetime and beyond his as well. There's a certain fluidity with chronology and a fluidity with style. And certainly I would not be the first person, you know, that one would think of in casting an Otto Frank. But that's the benefit of being able to cast myself. [laughs]

But clearly there's a resonance in Otto's story that runs really deep for you.

Yeah. This is the latest edition of what I do as a performer onstage, as someone who entered graduate school thinking that he was gonna do a Ph.D. in History but wound up doing historically-fused and focused works for the stage. So in that way I think it makes a lot of sense, having played Huey Newton and Frederick Douglass and Christopher Columbus and Juan Marichal and John Roseboro and Rodney King. It's a long lineage of historical characters that I've played and tried to bring into the present moment, kicking and screaming as it were.

Hal Holbrook was a great inspiration to me, having seen some version of his Twain when I was a child. He began his work on Mark Twain as an undergraduate in the 1950s and continued to play Twain into this century. In fact, he said that he played Twain longer than Twain played himself.

Otto Frank features a live score by Marc Anthony Thompson.

Yeah, Marc Anthony Thompson is my longtime musical collaborator. We go back 30 years now. Our first piece actually was presented in San Francisco at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, a piece called Christopher Columbus 1992, in which I played Columbus who is a man still among us, a lounge entertainer with political aspirations. And he's brought Marc Anthony Thompson into the theater because Thompson's holding up a sign that says "Will work for food." So he takes him to McDonald's, gets him a Happy Meal, and employs him to be his DJ for the evening. That's how Thompson and I began working together. A Huey P. Newton Story, which actually began at the Magic Theatre, was a piece which Marc Anthony scored live and went on to a very fulfilling run all over the world, and is on Hulu as we speak, because my longtime colleague Spike Lee captured it in New York.

What is your process for working with Marc Anthony?

Well, it changes. It depends on what we're doing. We've done I think about 17 pieces now so sometimes it'll start with words that I have written. Sometimes it will start with words that I am improvising. Sometimes it actually starts with his score. There's a piece that we did, for example, called Who Killed Bob Marley? in which he created an hourlong dub piece, if you will, and then it was illustrated by video footage which had been shot by the great Arthur Jafa and edited by a great editor by the name of Kim Chisholm, and then after we added sound and projection, I came on top of that with my improvised performance.

With Otto Frank, it's a scripted piece, and Marc Anthony has come in and scored it live, so he's not just creating pieces that somebody else is pushing the button for. He's there with me in the room, in the same way that we've worked on A Huey P. Newton Story, for example. He is sensitive to the temperature in the room and he's also riding my microphone and incorporating it in the sounds and the melodies that he is bringing to the table. It's an exciting way of working for us, and hopefully for the audience as well. We're inspired by the great jazz musicians in particular, and I think that we word people are simply trying to catch up to everything that's been achieved in that great tradition.

This run is certainly not your first experience with either Campo Santo or Magic.

No. Campo Santa presented my Frederick Douglass Now piece, which is comparable to the Twain piece in that I started working on Frederick Douglass as an undergraduate, as did Holbrook [with Twain]. We presented a very special performance of Douglass at Laney college in celebration of what would have been Frederick Douglass's 200th birthday. We also did Rodney King at Laney College, Campo Santo presented that. A fuller collaboration was a piece I wrote called Casa de Spirits, which was performed by the Campo Santo ensemble at the Yerba Buena Center. I wrote and directed it, and of course Marc Anthony Thompson did the scoring of it.

So we have been in a really fruitful collaborative process for the last few seasons, and I'm certainly looking forward to being with them under the Magic umbrella. It's a homecoming of many sorts. It is always good for me to get back to the Bay Area, cause I was born in Berkeley and I taught at Cal. And it's great to be back at the Magic, which along with Oakland Ensemble Theatre kicked off A Huey P. Newton Story. I'm certainly supportive of everything that Sean San José is doing there, and I think there's no better way of pushing this theater into the next generation. It's really a great privilege to be with this institution in this new form.

I'd like to talk a little about the beginnings of your career as an actor. Is it true that your class at Yale School of Drama included Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton and John Turturro?

Yes, that's true.

Did you know then that you were all going to have really successful careers as actors?

Well, John was someone who I think as a kid wanted to be an actor. He and his brother Nick apparently went to the movies and then would come home and act out all the scenes from the movies. John had already done some study before he came to Yale. I know that he had studied the Meisner Technique and had some experience, probably more than most of us.

Angela went to Yale as an undergraduate and for her senior project did a production of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. She starred in it and directed it as well. So I think she demonstrated an uncanny commitment very early on for doing really spectacular and deeply-rooted work.

Now, if you know the story of Mr. Dutton - he was in prison [as a youth]. And he was in telepathic communication with the late, great August Wilson. They started collaborating while Charles was still at the school, and he obviously has demonstrated not only his great capability as an actor, but also as an organizer, as a producer and as a director. It's an extraordinary story.

I had the opportunity to work with all of them of course at school, but later in films and they all happened to be the films of Spike Lee. So he kind of poached our class.

You've been in so many movies directed by Spike Lee that it's like you're part of his unofficial repertory company -

Well, I've done more films with Spike Lee than any other actor.

How did that relationship come about?

Cattle call audition.

Really?!

I was at the Guthrie doing Pinter, Ionesco, Dickens and Shakespeare and I had an afternoon off and I went to see this film called She's Gotta Have It. I sat through it twice and I said, "I've got to find out where this guy is and what he's doing next." Because at that point I didn't really have an idea of being a film actor. I was quite happy actually to be at the Guthrie, because it was the first time that I got to act for a living. All I had to do was wake up and act. That was a great year for me, to be a part of the company.

But when Spike's work appeared at the Uptown Cinema in Minneapolis, I knew that there were some other possibilities out there. I also knew that there was another young person who was trying to do onscreen what I was trying to do independently onstage. So I was able to finagle a cattle call audition in Los Angeles for his next film, his first studio film, called School Daze, which was a very ambitious piece. It was a dramedy, but it also had musical elements. I was chosen to be a part of that ensemble and we've been working together ever since. And this month, in fact, opening night that I'm doing Otto Frank at the Magic Theatre, Spike is being honored by the Directors Guild as a pioneering and prolific film director, and it's very richly deserved.

You also appeared in the HBO series Oz, which is one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

Yeah. So was I killed or did I commit suicide? You tell me. [laughs]

Well, I could ask that same question about so many characters on that show, so....

Is that an "I don't know"? [laughs]

Oz was such an intense and fascinating prison drama.

That was a great ensemble.

What was it like working on that set?

It was very intense. You would have thought we were shooting on location in a real prison, but actually it was a soundstage in Chelsea, on 15th and I think 9th Avenue or someplace like that. So it was a completely designed environment, but one would have thought we were in a real prison. But you know, everybody brought their A game to the table.

So many amazing actors moved in and out of that show over the years. In sum total, I think it may have had the best ensemble cast of any show ever.

Hmmm, yeah. I think so. The work inspired there by Tom Fontana was tremendous. I have enjoyed coming in and out of the television world and the film world. I'm currently doing a series called All Rise on the Oprah Network, playing a judge, and that's been great. This is my second series on OWN, the first one being Queen Sugar. I'm going back and forth, doing this series and then doing Otto Frank and pulling in, you know, Frederick Douglass when I can and hopefully doing a lot more work. There's always something to be done.

I recently did Inside the Creole Mafia with my good friend Mark Broyard in San Francisco at the Climate Theater and Theater Artaud. It's a not-too-dark comedy, all about colorism and the great Creole culture that came out of New Orleans and has spread far and wide, especially here in Los Angeles, where we have thousands of people who left New Orleans, seeking the opportunity that they were denied in the Jim Crow South.

Do you have any plans for Otto Frank after the run at Magic?

I have lots of plans for it. [laughs] I had a plan for it to be at The Public Theatre last month, but the "Under the Radar" festival was cancelled. I definitely have ambitions for this piece, but this is the first time that we've ever really been able to pull a run together. We've had opportunities that have been cancelled in the last 18 months that have been very disappointing, but I'm looking forward to a great future for this piece. The Anne Frank legacy is an enduring one and there are constantly new elements of the story that evolve, and the world as it presents itself in this present moment is certainly open to this story.

I'm speaking [to you] on Ash Wednesday, and it's a time of true contemplation of mortality. You look at current events in places like Somalia and Ukraine and know that the struggle for sanity is an ongoing one. And one which this teenage girl addressed with such intelligence and a very disturbing sense of what the future would bring. I think Anne Frank is one of the writers, like Frederick Douglass, who will consistently be relevant to us as long as there is struggle in this world.

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Otto Frank will be performed live from March 12-27, 2022 on Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm and 8pm, at Magic Theatre's Fort Mason location (Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94123). Each show will be followed by a post-show discussion with Roger Guenveur Smith. For tickets and additional information, visit MagicTheatre.org.

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