Produced by Theatre MSU and generously sponsored by SOUL (Starkville Oktibbeha Unity League), "Anne and Emmett" centers around an imaginary conversation between Holocaust martyr Anne Frank and 1950s lynching victim Emmett Till.
The Janet Langhart Cohen drama highlights Frank, a 13-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided insight into the Holocaust, and Till, a 14-year-old African American youth whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the American Civil Rights Movement.
Originally staged on the MSU campus in fall of 2020, "Anne & Emmett" is being revived and taken on the road to Birmingham for performances at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Funded by the Birmingham Jewish Federation, the show will perform once for the general public in Birmingham and twice for large groups of invited area high school students, who will see the show for free, along with complimentary lunches and subsidized travel to and from the performance location.
Before the show hits the road, "Anne and Emmett" will perform one last public show in Starkville, onstage at Starkville Community Theatre on the night of Thursday, November 10 at 7:30 p.m.. Through a generous partnership with Theatre MSU, all proceeds from admission costs will serve as a fundraiser for SCT.
Know before you go: “Anne and Emmett” contains derogatory racial language and imagery that could be disturbing to audiences but reflects the realities of the lives and deaths of these hate crime victims. The intended audience for this production is junior high school and older.
Back in 2020, production director Tonya Hays said: "(This) play is an opportunity to promote healing and understanding... (It) provides an opportunity for social discourse and discussion of racism. It engages us in the complicated history of Mississippi and challenges us to ‘tikkun olam,’ Hebrew for ‘repair the world'."
The show's cast includes Allyn Hackman as Anne Frank, Cameron Mayers as Emmett Till, Brittany Page as Mamie Till, Paul Ruff as Otto Frank, and Gabe Smith as Narrator/J.W. Milam. The production runs in one continuous act, for approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
This performance is not included as part of any SCT season ticket, and admission can be purchased here online or by calling the physical box office at 662.323.6855. Ticket cost for this fundraiser show is $15 per person.
SCT's hosting of this production is supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
