The diary of Otto Frank

From a conversation in MU’s Western Historical Manuscript Collection comes a one-man play about journalist Arthur Unger and Holocaust survivor Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank.

The tape-recorded exchange, along with many others, was donated by Unger shortly before his death in 2004. A 1949 graduate of the School of Journalism, Unger was editor and publisher of Datebook magazine, an entertainment magazine published in the 1960s and ’70s, and at one point toured with the Beatles while reporting on them.

Kevin Babbitt, a doctoral student in theater at MU, found the exchange between Unger and Frank in the collection. Although it’s called an interview in the Unger collection, it is more a conversation about a proposed television special on a romance between Anne Frank and Peter van Pels, another young person hiding from the Nazis with her in an Amsterdam house. Anne Frank died in March 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, Van Pels two months later at the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

The TV special never occurred because of Frank’s reservations. However, their conversation forms the script for Babbitt’s play, “Being Frank,” which opens Friday at MU. It had a New York premiere in May as a memorial to Unger.

When Babbitt began research for his work, he was quickly drawn to the Frank conversation because Babbitt had played him in a high school production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “Otto Frank held immediate resonance for me,” he said.

There were other reasons for his choice. “They (Unger and Frank) had important things to say about prejudice and discrimination in this country and the world,” Babbitt said. “Unger shared as much as he asked.”

That conversational style is a pivotal part of the play, because Babbitt casts the audience as his opposite in each part of the interview. The most challenging part of the play is switching back and forth, Babbitt said. “I’m still working on it, still trying to make it smoother.”

David Moore is a historian in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection who worked with Babbitt during his research for the play.

“He listens to the tapes over and over, I guess for inflection and tone,” Moore said.

The play’s director, MU theater professor Heather Carver, was there when Babbitt first performed the play in May. “We wanted to do something for (Unger’s) family and friends,” Carver said.

Unger selected MU for his collection, Carver said, because it could be made accessible to students and the public. To demonstrate that accessibility, university officials contacted Carver based on her reputation as a solo performer; she and Unger planned to collaborate on a project before he died of a heart attack.

The memorial performance was held at the Anne Frank Center in Manhattan for Unger’s friends and family. At the time, the center was holding an exhibit of Otto Frank’s family photographs. Babbitt chose to perform in the same gallery space as the exhibit.

“The images in the background made the performance that much more powerful,” Carver said. The pair decided to add the visual element to the Columbia performance by showing a slide show of similar images on a television behind Babbitt. Although they are not the photos from the exhibit, they are photos from the Frank family.

The play is drawn almost directly from a tape recording of an hours-long conversation between Unger and Frank. In that sense, Babbitt said, the script was practically done. “I only edited and rearranged what was on the tape,” he said.