Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of William Cohen, a Bangor native, Maine’s U.S. Senator from 1979 to 1997 and former U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1997 to 2001, wrote a play in 2009 called “Anne & Emmett.”
In it, she imagines a conversation in the afterlife between Holocaust victim Anne Frank and Emmett Till, a young man who was murdered in Mississippi in the 1950s because he was black.
Cohen’s play will receive two series of performances this summer: July 28-30 at Metro Stage in Alexandria, Virginia, and Aug. 1-3 at the 2017 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina. The play has not been performed since 2014.
Langhart Cohen is a journalist, author and former model, who after a career in television broadcasting went on to publish two memoirs, including “My Life in Two Americas; From Rage to Reason” and “Love in Black and White,” co-written with William Cohen, about their interracial marriage. “Anne & Emmett” is her only play, and explores themes of racial persecution from the perspective of an African-American and a German Jew, both teenagers at the times of their murders. She married Cohen in 1996.