‘Anne & Emmett’ is timely play about racism

The black boy lay dead for all to see. His body was bloated, his face mutilated. The media arrived, and soon his image — and the resulting outrage — spread across the country like wildfire.

This is not the story of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. This is the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy whose brutal 1955 murder in Mississippi became a catalyst for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

And yet Brown’s and Till’s stories are eerily similar, says Janet Langhart Cohen, a former model and journalist whose play, “Anne & Emmett,” features a fictional dialogue between Till and Anne Frank. The play shows at the Indiana Repertory Theatre Sept. 4 to 6.

“It’s still happening,” she says. “It’s the same sad story. My play is timely, but sadly it’s also timeless.”

Her comparison between Till and the string of black men killed in controversial police shootings over the past year and a half — Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray — doesn’t stop there.

“Anne & Emmett” acknowledges the differences of circumstance between its two titular characters, yet it also makes a gripping historical link, if only by implication, between the institutionalized racism of Nazi Germany and of the American South.

Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis during World War II, and Emmett Till “were both murdered for something they couldn’t help — and their society couldn’t protect them,” Cohen says. “They were teenagers, they were ghettoized, there were curfews imposed on them.”

“Anne Frank wore patches so she could be identified as a Jew,” Cohen says. “In America, we don’t have to wear patches. We’re marked by the pigmentation of our skin.”

Cohen, 74, is one of the first black women to break into the television industry and has served as the first lady of the U.S. Armed Forces. Her husband is former United States Secretary of Defense William Cohen.

She grew up surrounded by racism. Her first memory of a cross was of one burning on her grandmother’s lawn. She grew up in poor, segregated Indianapolis. The Indiana Theatre — located in the same building the IRT now calls its home — had strict policies against black people.

“We’d have to sit up in the balcony,” she says. “If more whites came than could fit the theater, we had to wait outside until it emptied out. It’s rather ironic, and a testament to the progress we’re making, that I can now bring my play to the stage.”

“Anne & Emmett” was scheduled to debut at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2009. But hours before the curtains opened, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier shot and killed a black security guard at the museum.

The shooting reminded Cohen that the world of Anne Frank is not so far away from the one she lives in now. And Till’s death at the hand of white racists, 60 years later, remains resonant.

“People didn’t think this kind of injustice and murder with impunity was still happening,” Cohen says of the recent eruption of discussions about racism in America. “They thought this only happened in the days of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. It’s still happening. It’s the same old, same old.”

Too bad the Black Lives Matter movement, Cohen says, isn’t universally embraced by people of all races. “Anne & Emmett,” after all, is a plea for cross-racial understanding, an ideal all humans should work toward.

Cohen says she wrote the play as a response to a woman who once questioned why she wanted to confront racism in her memoir, “From Rage To Reason: My Life In Two Americas.” Why bring up all this conflict, the woman asked Cohen, and paint herself as a victim?

“She was telling me, ‘Go back in your closet and shut up. It’ll pass. Get over it,’” Cohen says. “Then I thought to myself, ‘No.’”

Star reporter Wei-Huan Chen can be reached at (317) 444-6249 or on Twitter at @weihuanchen.

If you go

What: “Anne & Emmett” by Janet Langhart Cohen

When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 4, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., Sept. 5, 2 p.m. Sept. 6

Where: Indiana Repertory Theatre, 140 W Washington St.

How much: $35