Dear friends,
Before we wind down 2024, I’m writing to tell you why I chose to make The Return of Benjamin Lay, and to excite you about its American premiere at Quantum in early 2025.
More than a year ago, I got a call from a person whose friendship means a lot to me. Rob Orchard is as important to the American theatre as anyone I can think of, for some 30 years Executive Director of American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, responsible for work that profoundly inspired me and changed what so many of us in the theatre do. Rob wanted to talk about a production he’d admired in London…its creators wanted an American premiere, and how proud was I that he thought Quantum Theatre was the place for it? Theatre royalty was involved: MacArthur Award-winning American playwright Naomi Wallace and director Ron Daniels, longtime leader of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who has directed the likes of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Imelda Staunton, to name just a few.
Those two great artists weren’t even the most interesting thing! Naomi Wallace had worked with a man whose name I also knew, Pittsburgh’s star historian Marcus Rediker. Naomi and Marcus have been friends and collaborators for years. She often references the historical roots of injustice in her plays, which led her to Marcus, perhaps most broadly known for his book, The Amistad Rebellion and the documentary film made with Tony Buba, Ghosts of Amistad, which chronicles a slave schooner and the brave people who seized it.
Marcus had unearthed another fascinating hero of history in his book The Fearless Benjamin Lay, and Naomi and Marcus wrote the play we will produce together, as equal partners. Which brings us to the fourth fascinating collaborator on the project, Mark Povinelli, without whom it would have remained a two-dimensional work on the page. Benjamin Lay was a Little Person. The struggles inherent in that circumstance make his heroic activism all the more astonishing. Mark Povinelli was the actor, and the man, for the job of this one-person play. An activist himself, Mark is a former President of the American Association of Little People who has fought discrimination with a Ben Lay-like intensity…as well as a celebrated actor with Ben Lay-like charisma. I chose to make The Return of Benjamin Lay because who wouldn’t want to work with these four people?
Back to my pride, which I hope you’ll share. Naomi Wallace, Marcus Rediker, Ron Daniels, and Mark Povinelli needed me and Quantum – and by Quantum, I mean you, an audience with the taste, desire for adventure, and highly developed sense of justice to bring The Return of Benjamin Lay to life on American soil. Return he will, to his Pennsylvania Quaker roots, and I hope we will take courage from his example.
See you at the show, in 2025.
Karla
