Emancipation

Swinging nooses at the top of Emancipation announce this remarkable production’s twofold message: What you are about to see will be brutal—and the struggle is ongoing. Ty Jones’s drama tells the story of a little-known episode from American history which defies our conventional mythos of the slavery era. In 1831, an educated slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of 55 white people and a swift retribution by authorities that took the lives of 200 African-Americans, most of them innocent. It is a complex story, and Jones (who portrays Turner) and director McElroen don’t flinch from its most difficult aspects.

Turner’s cause was just but his methods excessive (women and children were killed along with slaveholding men). Yet the rebellion would never have existed without the greater systematic cruelty of the South’s “peculiar institution,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. Jones presents all sides of this horrible equation: the easily digested heroes and villains (innocent slaves, nasty slave owners) and the two problematic figures at the story’s core—the suicidal prophet Turner, willing to wreak destruction in pursuit of freedom; and Thomas Gray (Sean Patrick Reilly), a sensitive, liberal white lawyer who wants to help but is ineffectual in the face of so great an injustice. These questions are enacted and debated in a swift, poetically staged production, punctuated with powerful spirituals, African chants and (believe it or not) comic relief. Emancipation is not just bracing theater, but a timely plea for racial self-reflection.