Truth and Consequences

The Broadway revival of Parade-starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond couldn't come at a more timely moment. Leslie Camhi explores the urgent new production.

-  Leslie Camhi

I’m generally an anxious person,” admits Ben Platt, who was just off the plane from Sundance when we spoke. “But I find I can channel that pretty well into the characters I play,” he adds. That’s an understatement for the actor whose jittery, star-making turn in the title role of Dear Evan Hansen helped jump-start a national debate on adolescent mental health, and who returns to Broadway this spring in a much-lauded revival of the 1998 musical Parade.

Set in the early-20th-century Jim Crow South, Parade is based upon the true story of Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Brooklyn Jew who moved to Atlanta, married Lucille Selig—a daughter of the city’s close-knit, well-off German Jewish community— and became superintendent of the National Pencil Company factory. In 1913, when the body of a 13-year-old worker named Mary Phagan was discovered in the factory’s basement, suspicion for the white girl’s murder initially fell upon a Black night watchman, Newt Lee, and the “Negro sweeper,” Jim Conley. But botched police work, a public prosecutor with overweening political ambitions, and sensationalized reports in the local press combined to whip the public into a vicious prejudicial frenzy— against Yankees, northern industrialists, and Jews. In this inflamed and tainted atmosphere, Frank became the prime suspect, was tried, and sentenced to death by hanging. When, after two years of failed legal appeals, Georgia governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison, some “upstanding citizens” in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, abducted Frank from his jail cell and lynched him.