‘Slam Frank’ - woke or anti woke Anne Frank themed play

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The question "Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?" first went viral on X (then still called Twitter) in 2022. Though the post has since been deleted, it sparked a wave of reactions — from thousands of replies to earnest op-eds in Jewish newspapers around the world, all arguing that Anne Frank was not, in fact, privileged.

The online uproar eventually faded, but it planted the seed for American writer Andrew Fox. He imagined a satirical musical about a progressive theater troupe that decides to adapt Anne Frank's famous diary for the stage. The troupe is so committed to inclusivity that even Holocaust memory must be reimagined through a contemporary lens.

Anne is now Anita Franco, a pansexual Latina immigrant. Her boyfriend, Peter van Daan, is a nonbinary climate activist. Every character in the play represents a different minority with the exception of Hermann, Peter's father, who remains a white male – as a representative of the oppressive patriarchy.

The musical that Fox wrote with Joel Sinensky – both are Jewish – is called "Slam Frank." No, this isn't a riff on "The Producers" – the two insist that their musical isn't a joke. It will debut in the fall Off-Broadway at the Asylum NYC theater on 23rd Street. All the shows for the first week are sold out.

The musical has already caused a stir; Fox showed some of the creative process on TikTok. The clips he posted, from him composing songs at his piano at home to onstage numbers from early performances, amassed millions of views – and a load of hate responses.

In one video, the actress who plays Anne is wearing a checked dress with a huge yellow Star of David, the kind the Nazis made the Jews wear. She's enthusiastically singing about the diary she's starting to write, replete with Latino slang.

Adulation and death threats
"I thought: What if the kind of person who wrote that tweet rewrote 'The Diary of Anne Frank' as a hip-hop musical?'" Fox told Haaretz in an interview. "Usually my bad ideas, which are in never-ending supply, amuse me and promptly disappear. But this one idea stuck around, and after about a year of it haunting me, I realized I had to write it or I'd never get my brain back."

What kind of reactions have you received so far?
"A little bit of everything – adulation, outrage, online petitions, standing ovations and even a handful of death threats. People are hungry for something crazy like this. We Americans have spent over a decade self-sorting into these tiny little bubbles of agreement, where our social circles and algorithms reflect our own worldviews right back at us.

"'Slam Frank' is so ideologically ambiguous and shocking that it ends up putting a diverse group of people into the comments sections, and by extension, into the theater. We have the far left and far right and everything in between riffing together in the comments."

This mini-tempest blew into Israel, too, with a post by Under the Radar, an Instagram news group that caters to a young audience. The post received over 2,000 shares, and some responders were horrified by the use of Anne's story.

Fox and Sinensky even reacted to a post in garbled Hebrew, courtesy of Google Translate. "Please, Inshallah, remove the content, " they wrote, never breaking character. "The use of Hebrew writing is a profound trigger for the victimhood of colonial practices and ethnic-national oppression."

Were you worried that people might not realize that the musical is satire? It seems that this is already happening.
I'm counting on it! Look, this show and its social media are a Rorschach test. I've found generally that what people take away from it tells us more about them than it does about the show itself."

In recent years, of course, representation has been a hot-button issue; we're getting works replete with characters of different origins, religions and sexual orientations. But we're also seeing, for example, "Hamlet" with the lead character a woman or a member of the LGBTQ community. Then there are efforts like "Slam Frank."

Critics say that Fox and Sinensky's work is an unjustified rewriting of history. Fans say that it's the order of the day and that you can't stage something nowadays without women, the LGBTQ community or nonwhite people.

If so many people think that a hip-hop play about a Latina Anne Frank is entirely serious, maybe identity politics and political correctness have gone a step too far? It seems that this is what Fox and Sinensky are trying to convey, whether they admit it or not.

"I wouldn't call 'Slam Frank' a critique of anything. Joel, my co-writer, and I certainly have our own opinions about many things – and often very different ones at that. But it would be a mistake to assume that we're trying to convey any single worldview," Fox says.

"If I had wanted to send a political message, I would have written an essay. Messages make for terrible theater. So many artists think that the worst thing they can be is socially irresponsible, or politically misaligned, but in theater, the worst thing you can be is boring. And God, plays with clear messages are so boring.

"I would much rather that the audience had an experience, a catharsis, a shock to the system, something that they can chew on and argue about. If the whole audience walks away understanding and agreeing with my point of view – whatever that point of view may be – then I've failed."

Some people think that Fox and Sinensky's idea is even harmful. "'Slam Frank' is what happens when someone takes a work of satire too far," the American Jewish website The Jewish Link wrote.

It added: "This whole concept is meant to ridicule anyone who tries to make the Holocaust not about the Jews, but comes off as an insensitive evocation of Anne Frank's name and in addition, the memory of the 6 million murdered along with her.

Some have said the show makes light of Anne Frank and Holocaust memory, even if it's satirical. What's your response to that?

"Our team saw the opportunity to create something different. Very few of our critics have had the experience of seeing the musical in its full form, which is how it's supposed to be experienced. Come September, people will be able to see something much closer to a finished product and judge for themselves.

"What I consider to be the best and most important part of the 'Slam Frank' experience is leaving the dark room of the theater and heading to the bar. People feel like they have to talk to other people about what they just experienced. It's a social lubricant, a conversation piece. That's built into the whole experience of our show – not just the performance, but the shared aftermath.

"And look, if people don't like it, they're free to protest outside the theater, leave critical comments on our social media, or try to pass a law censoring us. We encourage it."

Dave Chappelle and Kee & Peele made light humour of black people in slavery. It's part of the "culture" when descendants of slaves create art as a coping mechanism to deal with intergenerational trauma.

Aboriginal Australians use art and humour to deal with "invasion" and resilience of culture" as self-expression

So like Jewish people of the diaspora use humour in art in the same way.

Purpose of art (apologies this comes across as a huge deconstruction) is to present something as entertainment but change the way people think and if done right can make a huge impact on a person's inner consciousness. Art is basically an attempt to tap into our deeper self and make connections with people across time and space.

I learned this from watching "Sinners" which also had some weird crossovers . So if this play is Anne Frank as a Pansexual Latina Immigrant: Holocaust Hip-hop Musical then I think the intention is the same, perhaps provoke outrage but change your perspective and make connections you never thought possible. America and the western world needs this more than ever.

Or enforce the idea that identity politics has gone far by using an extreme example to make fun of it. I don’t think it will change the perspective of wokes, they might take it literally and love it for making MAGA’s meltdown. Who knows the play has not opened yet.

It’s hard to explain exactly what Slam Frank is. It’s a musical about Anne Frank in the hip-hop style of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but also with a touch of Bob Fosse. Anne is Latina and queer; her mother, Edith, is Black.

This is not race-blind casting. It’s very much on purpose, a way to leverage Anne Frank’s story for a send-up of identity politics. If that sounds pretty offensive, well, that’s kind of the point.

Slam Frank began as a parody video posted to Instagram by Andrew Fox, who is Jewish; online, he played the part of a theater director trying to create a chance for “Latinx girlies to feel seen, to feel included, to feel like they’re a part of the Holocaust.” Despite — or, perhaps, because — of how edgy the concept was, the social media account went so viral that it birthed a full-fledged show. Or, arguably, two; the conceit is a play within a play, a production of Anne Frank staged by a theater troupe working to “decolonize” the Holocaust.

The show’s jokes aren’t really focused on Anne Frank, or Anita Franco, as she is dubbed in the play. Instead, they skewer woke culture. Otto, Anita’s father, is neurodivergent, a fact he reminds everyone of about once every five minutes. Peter Van Daan, Anita’s crush, realizes they’re nonbinary, leading to an entire musical number in which each resident of the Annex discovers their own marginalized identity. “Every woman is a Jew hiding in her own attic,” warbles one character about her newly realized feminism. It culminates with the cast ripping off their yellow stars to replace them with pronoun pins in the same shape.

A few years ago, Slam Frank would have been unimaginable. But at a sold-out performance late on a Tuesday, the audience was eating it up like they’d been starving for years. The laughter was so raucous that it could occasionally be hard to hear the dialogue.

The question is what changed so that a New York audience could laugh so heartily and so openly at jokes making fun of disabilities, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation — jokes that just a few years ago would have gotten someone canceled by a full-fledged angry online mob. Even today, there is a fully-serious Latinx production of The Diary of Anne Frank going up in Los Angeles, which the director said was meant to provoke discussion about immigration in the U.S.

It’s not that people aren’t upset; some writers for Jewish publications have accused the show of going “too far.” Reducing the focus on Jewish victims is, sometimes, a tactic of Holocaust deniers or distorters. People get defensive. Fox said the show got kicked out of a workshop program.

But Slam Frank isn’t really about the Holocaust; it’s about what happens when we talk about the Holocaust in an era in which certain identities are not considered oppressable.

Fox was inspired by a viral Twitter thread from 2021 that accused Anne Frank of white privilege, calling her a “colonizer.” I wrote about this discourse at the time; ahistorical discussions of Anne Frank’s purported whiteness were cropping up every few months during that period, as the Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic brought identity politics to the main stage.

This discourse, while obviously absurd — Jews in the 1930s were not considered white — was nevertheless taken somewhat seriously in some circles. So, to make Anne Frank more unambiguously sympathetic, Fox assigned her and her compatriots in the Annex every extra identity she might need to qualify for victimhood.

Anne Frank’s story is particularly well-suited to a send-up of identity politics. Not only is it a narrative that most people know well — which is important since Slam Frank can sometimes be so focused on its one-liners that the beats of the story get muddled — but the Holocaust has become the archetype of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Online, anyone who is persecuting anyone else is quickly labeled a Nazi or called Hitler; the Jews, then, become the archetypal victim. It’s fertile ground for satirizing the so-called oppression Olympics.

For all its lambasting of a type of political correctness usually associated with the left, however, Slam Frank is not a conservative or right-wing production, though it’s also clearly not “woke.” It’s a hard show to pin down; it feels like a Rorschach test in ideology. Or, to better reflect its social media roots, it feels like one giant exercise in trolling.

Going off of the bonafides and bios of the cast and creative team, however, there are hints that the show is at least somewhat identified with the very culture it’s skewering. Olivia Bernábe, who plays Anita, uses they/them pronouns in real life, despite all the show’s jokes about pronouns. Joel Sinensky, who wrote the book, has worked on another project with Chapo Traphouse the podcast king of the dirtbag left — a brand of leftism that rejects the etiquette of the left while retaining its political aims.

It seems safe to infer that the show’s critiques are from within the liberal milieu it’s satirizing. Sigmund Freud, in a lengthy text on humor — Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious — theorized at one point that “every joke calls for a public of its own” and that sharing the joke demonstrates “psychical conformity.” So the question becomes when, and why, the left finally became comfortable laughing at itself.

One of the show’s stranger bits involves Anita regularly communing with her abuela, who was lost in a border crossing. Or something — it’s hard to follow.

Some of Slam Frank’s jokes do go a bit far — there are, of course, big and important lessons to learn about the way systemic oppression still operates in society, and it was good that we spent the past few years grappling with them. The show makes fun of the idea that a group hiding from the Nazis would be worried about such trivial problems as the perfect label for their sexuality, but the real Anne Frank did grapple with her sexual feelings toward both boys and girls in her diary.

Still, most of Slam Frank’s jokes are not laughing at people’s identities themselves, which saves it from seeming mean-spirited. The butt of the joke is not that Peter is nonbinary or that Edith is Black or that Otto is neurodivergent; it’s the way the fellow residents of the Annex react to these labels.

And even if Slam Frank sometimes overshoots the mark, it’s reclaiming something else: funniness.

After Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in the presidential election, more and more pundits began to point out that scolding voters is not a winning strategy. Liberals had somehow made their brand into telling people off while Republicans, once known for stodgy lectures about tradition and sexual mores, became the party of fun.

The way for the left to come back from such bad branding is to learn how to laugh at itself. And self-deprecating humor is what Jews are best known for — that and the Holocaust. So maybe turning Anne Frank into a joke isn’t so strange after all.