onStage – Director Ron Daniels and historian Marcus Rediker recount the play’s journey to Quantum Theatre.
Side by side on the Zoom screen, avoiding icy streets and freezing temperatures, were the eminent director Ron Daniels and award-winning historian and author/playwright Marcus Rediker. My visit to the newly renovated Carnegie Library of Braddock would have to wait until the American premiere of The Return of Benjamin Lay, a Quantum Theatre production opening on January 31, 2025.
For now, a conversation about “one of the most fascinating historical characters I had never heard of” was about to unfold.
The story had been buried with faint mentions in historical accounts, until Rediker’s book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, turned a spotlight on the man who also was a shepherd, sailor and, not least, according to the author, a prophet.
Rediker, with the esteemed playwright Naomi Wallace, has created a theatrical work that continues his mission to illuminate Benjamin Lay’s contributions to social justice, and what Daniels calls “a warning for today’s world.”
Benjamin Lay, who stood 4 feet tall, was born in the UK and emigrated to the Philadelphia area by way of Barbados, where his activism was ignited by witnessing the horrors of slavery. His 1738 book, All Slave Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage: Apostates, is in the Library of Congress.
The actor and advocate Mark Povinelli, a past president of the Little People of America, portrays Lay in a time-bending story (think the “return” of the title). A 2023 Guardian editorial about the lone previous production, at London’s Finborough Theatre, stated, “Lay’s example is a sharp reminder that yesterday’s impossible causes can become today’s inevitable principles – but that the journey is often made through shocking confrontation and personal sacrifice.”
Asked about who gets to tell our stories when we are gone, Rediker was reminded about a reading in July for the annual convention of Little People of America, of which Povinelli is the immediate past president for six years.
“After the show, one of the LPA activists, Rachel Keller, said, ‘Benjamin Lay came home tonight. He is ours. He is part of the community now.’ We’ll never have another performance like that in which there is so much powerful immediate response and understanding of the life of Lay and the life of the actor,” Rediker recalled. “It’s an example of a community that is always struggling for a voice, and the play helped to express that.”
Benjamin Lay himself described his radical activism and inner struggles, writing, “It is true I’ve done … extravagant things, every one of them a brutal trial in my soul, but all in service of Truth.”
To reveal Lay’s truth today, Rediker, a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, has had support from Pitt throughout his journey, including the addition to the play’s creative team of Tony-winning actor Bill Irwin, as a movement coach.
Irwin participates in Daniels’ “Shakespeare Sunday Salons,” where a group of American actors gather with the director on Zoom, to discuss and read from the Bard’s works.
“It was a wonderful opportunity” that followed 18 months of Daniels and Povinelli working via Zoom, “and thrashing through the play, and trying to understand all the non sequiturs and time jumps, and trying to fathom exactly what Benjamin’s narrative was from the inside. So then, thanks to the University of Pittsburgh, we were able to bring together Mark and Bill. They spent three or four days just working out the physicality of the character. It was really wonderful, and a very important marker in our rehearsal process.”
Both Daniels and Rediker boast credits a mile long – the British Daniels, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theater (ART), and Rediker, whose repertoire includes not only The Fearless Benjamin Lay (Beacon Press 2017), but the Prophet against Empire: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel (with David Lester and Paul Buhle, Beacon Press, 2021).
Daniels had worked with theater producer and educator Rob Orchard at both Yale and ART, and Orchard, in turn, had worked with Quantum Theatre founder and artistic director Karla Boos. Orchard made the introductions when the creative team members were looking for a venue in America, and that’s how the play landed in Pittsburgh.
The Return of Benjamin Lay will move on in March, to a very different vibe from the historic Braddock library: a black box theater at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in Greenwich Village, New York City. In May, the next stop is Quintessence Theatre, at The Sedgwick Theater in Germantown, PA.
Here’s more of onStage Pittsburgh’s conversation with the director and co-playwright of The Return of Benjamin Lay.
QUESTION: Marcus, how did Benjamin Lay enter your life?
REDIKER: I first encountered Benjamin Lay more than 25 years ago as I was working on a book with Peter Linebaugh called The Many Headed Hydra, and we were studying the development of abolitionism in relation to periods of intense resistance and rebellion by enslaved people. It happened that the 1730s was a decade in which there was a tremendous amount of resistance, and Benjamin Lay published his book All Slave Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage: Apostates in 1738. So I read that book and was fascinated by it. … I learned more about Lay’s practice of “guerilla theater,” and I decided this guy really deserves his own book.
QUESTION: How did the idea come together to develop it into a stage play?
REDIKER: I had worked with Naomi Wallace on a play of hers called The Liquid Plain, which was based on a story in a previous book of mine, The Slave Ship: Human History. I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where Naomi and I did a couple of events about our collaboration, and we were sitting outside in a cafe talking, and she said, “Well, what are you writing now?” I said, “I’m writing a book about this character named Benjamin Lay.” She said, “I’ve never heard of him. Tell me about him.” And so after I told her about him, she said, ‘We’re going to write a play about him.” She was fascinated by the theatricality of his protests. To be frank, I didn’t really believe her at the time … but it turns out that we did.
QUESTION: Ron, how did you become part of this collaboration?
RON DANIELS: I’ve now directed two or three plays of Naomi’s and a movie as well. She asked me to read it, and I fell in love with it. Several other directors had looked at it, and it’s a difficult subject and a difficult proposition, but that’s exactly what I was looking for. So I’m very happy to be onboard.
QUESTION: The story is often described in terms of a “Little David” versus Goliath. In terms of casting, how did you find Mark?
DANIELS: I auditioned two little people in the United Kingdom who didn’t seem to be right for it or ready for it, because one of the big problems is that the play is essentially text heavy, and it requires actors who are capable of delivering the text vividly and confidently. So I kept looking, and at the Shakespeare Sunday Salon … I asked if anyone knew of a person who could play Benjamin Lay, and one of them introduced me to Mark. … Suddenly, I remember writing to Naomi and Marcus, saying, “I think we’ve landed on our feet,” because he responded so well. He’s a remarkable young actor.
REDIKER: One of Ron’s early comments about the play was how hard it was going to be to find an actor who could do it, because the play is very demanding. So we too feel very fortunate that Ron was able to find Mark who has, I don’t know how better to put it, that he has the depth of soul required for this kind of part.
QUESTION: What’s it been like for you, Marcus, who has the one portrait that existed of him but mostly, how you imagined him in your head, now to watch him come to life on the stage?
REDIKER: It’s a really interesting proposition because I think Ron would probably agree that we all have slightly different visions of Benjamin Lay. We have independent understandings of him. … So this has been a remarkable process, and I learned a lot from all of my fellow members of this creative team about a subject that I thought I knew inside out.
DANIELS: You have been incredibly brave as well, Marcus, because look, the interesting thing is that the play is not an adaptation of the book. The play is an imaginative reinvention of his life. I find that absolutely amazing. … For example, one of the encounters that Benjamin Lay has in the play is with a character from Barbados … who died in a slave rebellion in 1816. But just a second – how can that happen? We are in 1738. And yet, because theater gives us this freedom. … So it must have been very difficult for Marcus, a rigorous historian, to allow for poetic imagination to sift into his original story.
QUESTION: So how would you describe the narrative? As nonlinear?
REDIKER: Naomi and I came up with the idea that Benjamin had returned from the dead to address a Quaker meeting, but also to speak to us in the present about his hard-won wisdom about the world, and how if people had listened to him 300 years ago, we would be living in a different world right now.
QUESTION: Do you feel like it’s kismet that you’ve landed here, working with Quantum, for the U.S. premiere?
REDIKER: Basically, I think the story appealed to Karla, and she had great respect for Rob Orchard. She already knew a great deal about Ron and Naomi – she calls them “theater royalty” – so I think we had a lot of different things working for us.
QUESTION: Ron, this company being an environmental theater company, did that matter to you?
DANIELS: We did the show in London in what is essentially a found space. It’s literally the drawing room of a Victorian house. So we took away the coverings of the windows to let in the fresh air, so that the audience could actually see the world outside, passers-by, tall double-deck buses going past. And I love that contrast, that we are doing a piece of wildly imaginative theater … and that energy and sense of the real world outside was quite wonderful. When we knew that it was Karla who does theater in found spaces, that was very exciting. And she has found this space, which has sunlight streaming in during the day, and we can see the buildings across the road. To me, that’s part of a texture, which I think is very important.
QUESTION: Most playwrights are never done with their scripts, but do you find things continually changing as you go through this?
DANIELS: Yes, and most playwrights are right. When we work in the theater, we continually evolve … as we try to get closer to what is exciting, theatrical, vivid and really alive. … Theater is always a journey of discovery, a place of turbulence. So that’s where we are now, discovering this new space and how that will affect us, and what it will be tomorrow.
QUESTION: Marcus, Ron mentioned this briefly, but what’s it been like for you to let go of the historian in you and go into this different space of imagination?
REDIKER: From the moment Naomi and I started working on this play, she repeated to me several times, and I think Ron has repeated it too, “Marcus, we’re not writing history; now we’re writing something completely different.” But that doesn’t mean that the history is absent – far from it – nor does it mean that there wasn’t imagination in the discovery of that history. But what it means is that this thing is an evolving entity. You might call it a life form in its own right. And I do remember in the early London rehearsals, I didn’t like changing the text, did I Ron?
DANIELS: You did not.
REDIKER: Look, I’ve spent 40 years writing books, and when you write it, it’s done. So this is a new experience for me to write something that’s constantly changing. But I think I’ve finally gotten my mind wrapped around it now, and I do see very clearly how Ron and Mark have influenced what we want the text to say. They’ve helped us to see new possibilities in it. This has been sometimes trying, but I think it is really a deep and fulfilling process. … The issues of language in the play are quite complicated … and I think it took someone of Ron’s expertise to figure out how the actor is supposed to handle this. And I do remember Ron saying that most American actors are not trained in this idiom, they are more action-oriented. Is that right, Ron?
DANIELS: Yes, absolutely. One of the things I hadn’t quite realized, particularly in our world nowadays where we invent, we are continually submitted to untruths. What are the truths nowadays, and who is right? And when one looks at history, for example, Macbeth, does the audience know that Macbeth reigned very successfully for many years before he started a killing spree? Shakespeare used history often to write the story that he wanted to write. And this is the beautiful thing about what Marcus and Naomi have done, to tell a complicated story. And Mark and I were adamant that this should not sound in any way like a history lesson or lecture, so we’ve tried very hard to give it a real texture. And thankfully Mark, because he’s a remarkable actor and a remarkable man, finds something, as Marcus has said, that connects his soul to something that is other. I find that very exciting.
QUESTION: What does it mean for you personally that your play is going to have its U.S. premiere here in Pittsburgh?
REDIKER: It means a lot. Partly for reasons that Ron mentioned earlier, the University of Pittsburgh has been extraordinarily generous in supporting this endeavor. … I’ve just learned that the dean, John Cooper, who committed to the project years ago, is going to be there on opening night, even though he’s now retired. So this is really a wonderful thing.
QUESTION: Is there something more you’d like to add?
REDIKER: One thing I often say is, for the vast majority of people who go to the play, they’re about to meet one of the most fascinating historical characters they’ve never heard of. Benjamin Lay was, Naomi likes to say, not forgotten, but he was buried in words in the aftermath of the Civil War. During this conservative time of retrenchment, abolitionists were looked upon as dangerous fanatics. And Benjamin Lay, who was actually very well known in his own day, more or less disappeared from the public record and public memory. So part of my goal in all of this, in the scholarly book, the graphic novel, the play, there’s also a children’s book that’ll come out next fall, through all of this, my goal is to make sure that he’s never forgotten again.
DANIELS: What I’m personally interested in is, how does the play, irrespective of its central character, affect us in our lives today? What are the resonances in an era where protest is becoming more and more dangerous? … For me, you see, as a theater man, I am more fascinated with that than with the historical aspect of it. … I think that Benjamin Lay committed his shocking protests to warn that the covetous slave owners were in danger of the wrath of God and the apocalypse. And that perplexes me and worries me …
REDIKER: My question, Ron, is, where are our prophets today?
DANIELS: That is a very, very good question.
RON DANIEL’S PITTSBURGH CONNECTION
If Daniels name seems familiar, he is at least partially responsible for Mark Rylance and his wife, Claire van Kampen, coming to Pittsburgh in 1992. He originally directed Hamlet in 1989 at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he spent 14 years as an associate director. For its remounting at ART , a co-production with Pittsburgh Public Theater, Daniels brought with him Rylance and the composer/musician van Kampen, who died just this past week, at age 71. (Van Kampen’s reimagining of the 1730 opera Idapse was produced by Quantum Theatre, in collaboration with Chatham Baroque and supported by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, at the Byham Theater in 2022.) He also directed the Mozart opera Cosi Fan Tutte for Pittsburgh Opera in 2006.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Quantum Theatre presents The Return of Benjamin Lay, January 31- February 23, 2025, at the Braddock Carnegie Library, 419 Library Road, Braddock, PA. Tickets: Visit https://www.quantumtheatre.com/lay/ .
