Ben Platt: It’s ‘difficult’ playing lynched Jewish man in Broadway’s ‘Parade’.
“It’s sad but it’s also really galvanizing and motivating because it feels really immediate,” he told Page Six exclusively at the Broadway opening of the revival of “Parade” on Thursday night.
“Usually, when you do a revival, you can feel a bit of separation from it,” Platt, 29, continued, “but we have little to none, which is a difficult blessing.”
“Parade” tells the true story of Jewish factory worker Leo Frank — played by Platt — who was convicted in 1913 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl.
Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Gov. John M. Slaton in 1915 after he reviewed thousands of pages of testimony that seriously called into question Frank’s guilt. Frank was subsequently kidnapped from prison by a lynching party and hanged from an oak tree.
“You want the truth about who you’re going to see tonight,” yelled one of the protesters in a video that was posted online. “You’re paying $300 to go f–king worship a pedophile, you might as well know what you’re talking about.”
“I think Judaism is the oldest racism in the world and I think sometimes because of that we forget it’s still here, whether it’s right in front of us with neo-nazis protesting in front of our theater or lurking in the shadows, in which Jews are left out of the conversation.”
