Interview: Slam Frank Writers Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky Want to Shake the Theater Out of Its Conservative Phase

Slam Frank provokes from first sight. Its logo looks a bit like the one for Hamilton, but the yellow silhouette stands atop a six-pointed star.

The musical send-up, not just of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 mega-hit musical but all that followed in its woke, depicts a troupe of ultra-progressive theatermakers revising the story of diarist and Holocaust victim Anne Frank, recasting her as Anita Franco, a genderqueer Latinx person in hiding—yes from the Nazis, but also from her authentic self. A laugh-out-loud lampoon of the theater and its obsession with identity politics, Slam Frank is set to begin preview performances at the Orpheum Theatre September 17 ahead of an October 4 opening night.

I loved the show’s developmental run last year at Asylum NYC, mostly for its willingness to transgress the manners that have become so stultifying to an increasingly irrelevant off-Broadway theater. Calling it the closest thing the New York theater has to an episode of South Park, I wrote, “It is telling that Slam Frank is being presented on this particular stage, at an improv comedy theater, and not at any of New York’s prestigious not-for-profits.”

“Joe’s Pub turned us down,” said composer Andrew Fox, recalling an attempt to mount a concert reading of the musical. “We had a friend of the show pitch it to a major institution, and their response was to suggest we submit the script to a sensitivity reader,” he disclosed, admitting that they briefly entertained the idea before concluding that the practice of “sensitivity reading” is a form of legalized extortion, in which writers pay for the silence of a potential critic while watering down their own work: “If we don’t bring one of them on board, they’re going to blast us.” If you’ve seen the show, you know that the edits didn’t stick.

Sporting a scruffy gray-streaked beard and fiery eyes, Fox has the aura of an Old Testament prophet, decrying the decadence of the American theater over a steaming bowl of chili at a downtown Manhattan diner, one of those holdouts from an earlier New York, where the surly Greek waiters tell you what to order rather than the other way around. This is the secret refuge of Fox and his partner in crime, book writer Joel Sinensky, a demure presence by comparison. If Fox’s foot is on the gas pedal of this incendiary musical and social media performance art project, Sinensky is the one gently pumping the brakes so they don’t crash into a utility pole.

“When we were initially writing it, he really was much more courageous than me and pulled me along with some of the more provocative material,” Sinensky told me.  He feared that putting his name on the show would alienate friends and potential collaborators. “But at a certain point, I became so proud of the work on an artistic level that I stopped really caring about that.”

Fox and Sinensky want to provoke, but they’re doing it with style. Slam Frank is a legitimately well-crafted musical comedy with earworm melodies and jokes that will leave you gasp-laughing. Most impressively, Fox has been able to mold the turgid prose of academia into something that rhymes: “I’m with my cis femmes, fightin’ systems, writing treatises. / Never can defeat us, ’cause it’s us against the fetuses,” Otto Frank raps during the number “Allies,” in which the characters fantasize about what they will do with their newfound freedom once the Allies liberate Amsterdam. All agree that a program of mass sterilization would be desirable to help fight climate change.

Sinensky sat in the back of the house for most performances of the developmental run, always keeping one eye on the stage and another on the audience. “Watching them laugh was very satisfying,” he said, “but my favorite part was watching the audience be genuinely shocked by what was happening.” The theater, a place where open-minded people gather with their phones off, should be the ideal safe space for pushing societal boundaries and questioning taboos; but lately, that has rarely been the case.

“The show is both of us grappling with how artists have been becoming very prescriptive about how the audience is supposed to feel about things,” said Sinensky. “The last 10 years of theatermaking have been, not politically, but aesthetically very conservative.” He insists Slam Frank is not “anti-woke” but a reaction to the groupthink that has taken over so many writers’ room and production meetings, and the unchallenged assumption that everyone in the audience shares the same politics.

Rather than wrapping their audience in the warmly constrictive blanket of presumed consensus, Fox and Sinensky intend to delight and offend all comers. “If you can figure out where we personally stand on an issue based on a joke, we don’t use it,” said Fox. “Also, if you have to have a certain stance in order to find the joke funny, we don’t do it.” This approach has earned the show fans (and detractors) on both the Left and the Right.

Sinensky maintains that the artists’ own feelings about the identity issues raised in Slam Frank are unsettled. “The show is us working out things that we’re thinking about and the audience is doing the same with its reaction. It’s meant to be this kind of exchange.” It’s a conversation, not an affirmation.

“There are some things that happen in the show that I’m personally uncomfortable with,” said Fox, “but my job isn’t to make the audience think what I think. My job is to give them a powerful fucking experience to shake them and make them question what they truly believe.” As he works through his own unsettled beliefs, there is one opinion he feels 100 percent confident about: “Art is not a policy paper.”