Play recounts the trial and lynching of Leo Frank, Atlanta’s ‘original sin’

Credit: Joan Marcus

Credit: Joan Marcus

The case’s legacy has evolved over a century, becoming a symbol of the larger, pervasive ills of antisemitism, wrongful convictions and injustice. Frank was posthumously granted an exoneration in 1986 after the courts recognized that prejudiced attitudes, flawed evidence and political pressure produced the unfair trial that led to his lynching. The pardon, however, didn’t take a stance on his guilt or innocence. His name still ruffles feathers.

Local Rabbi Steven Lebow has spent three decades fighting for Frank’s innocence. For years, his basement floor was covered in newspaper clippings, documents and cardboard boxes full of research. He recently donated his archives to the Atlanta Preservation Center. Honoring Jewish tradition to mark the site of the dead by name, he helped get a plaque installed on Frank’s lynching site at an office building in Marietta and has hosted multiple remembrance events.

“It is so their name is known and that their story is always told,” Lebow said. “All I’m trying to do is clear the name of an innocent man ... it’s been an uphill battle to get him exonerated ... I think the more people who know about the story of Leo Frank, the more they recognize it was the worst judicial scandal in the history of the state.”

Steve Oney, an Atlanta-based author who wrote the definitive book about the case, “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank” called the case “the original sin of Georgia.” At least four other books have been written about it.

Historically, the case is credited with inspiring the formation of the Anti-Defamation League. As such, neo-Nazi protesters have been known to show up at productions of “Parade” holding swastika signs and vehemently insisting Frank was a guilty pedophile.

An op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2023 summed up the case as “a parade that won’t end” and aptly quoted Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

There is the case — and then there is the musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1998.

Credit: Joan Marcus

Credit: Joan Marcus

The play, however, doesn’t burden itself with the nitty-gritty of Frank’s guilt or innocence. Rather, it grounds itself in its central characters, Frank and wife Lucille. As the aftermath of the trial unfolds, the couple navigates brutal public scrutiny. Their affection makes the play as much a personal story as a courtroom drama.

Uhry said this focus was an intentional choice he has been both praised and criticized for. When “Parade” was first staged, it received a harsh review from The New York Times critic who accused the play of avoiding the complexity and depth of the case. Yet, it still won two Tony Awards for best original score (by Jason Robert Brown) and best book of a musical (Uhry). It won another Tony when it was resurrected in 2018, winning for best revival of a musical.

Writing about a subject like Leo Frank in your hometown “takes guts,” Uhry said.

Writing the play was Uhry’s way of probing his own Southern Jewish roots. He grew up in Druid Hills decorating Christmas trees and hunting for Easter eggs. He was not religiously Jewish. When he moved to New York after high school, he began reflecting on the reasons for this diluted heritage. One memory always stuck with him: the Leo Frank case.

His great-uncle owned the pencil factory where Frank was accused of the crime. His grandmother knew Lucille Frank. And yet his family was hush-hush about the case. As a kid, Uhry educated himself about Leo Frank by bicycling to the library.

“I became fascinated and horrified by it and haunted by it,” Uhry said.

Years later, in the early 1990s in New York, he casually brought up the story with director and producer Hal Prince who, Uhry remembers, “put his glasses on top of his head and said, ‘Now that’s a musical.‘”

Thus began Uhry’s mission to write his third play set in the South. His previous two acclaimed plays, “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” are also Southern sagas.

Returning to Atlanta from his home in New York to see “Parade” alongside his Georgia-based family members “means everything,” Uhry said.

“To have it resonate like this after all this time is deeply moving to me,” he said. “To be celebrated in the town you grew up in for something you wrote is pretty high cotton.”

IF YOU GO

“Parade.” April 1-6. Tickets start at $34.50. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 855-285-8499, foxtheatre.org.