Synopsis

Anne & Emmett is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both victims of racial intolerance and hatred. Frank is the 15-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided a gripping perspective of the Holocaust. Till is the 14-year old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the American Civil Rights Movement.

The one-act play opens with the two teenagers meeting in Memory, a place that isolates them from the cruelty they experienced during their lifetime.

The beyond-the-grave encounter draws the startling similarities between the two youths’ harrowing experiences and the atrocities against their respective races.

In Memory, Anne recounts hiding in a cramped attic with her family after German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazi military to round up Jews and put them in concentration camps en route to gas chambers. Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the concentration camp.

Emmett tells Anne about how he, in 1955, ended up being brutally attacked by two racist white men, tortured, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied to his neck. This happened after he whistled at a white woman while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi.