Exhibit, discussion help launch ‘The Return of Benjamin Lay’ by Quantum Theatre
https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/exhibit-discussion-help
Thursday, January 9, 2025
By SHANNON O. WELLS
In 1682, Benjamin Lay was born an Englishman, but found his true calling as a radical 18th-century abolitionist only after emigrating to Pennsylvania and becoming a Quaker.
A portrait of 18th-century abolitionist Benjamin Lay.
Appropriately enough, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” a one-man show that debuted on a London stage in June 2023, will soon deliver Lay’s unique spirit and humanistic vision to the state where he first shared it. The Quantum Theatre production will run Jan. 31 through Feb. 23, at Braddock Carnegie Library, 419 Library Road, in Braddock.
In collaboration with Pitt’s Department of History and the University Library System, Quantum Theatre will host the Pitt community for an exhibit and panel discussion on Lay’s life and mission from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Jan. 23 in Hillman Library’s Archives & Special Collections Instruction Room.
A reception will follow the forum, whose panelists include Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker, co-authors of “The Return of Benjamin Lay”; its director, Ron Daniels; actor Mark Povinelli, and Quantum Theatre’s Artistic Director Karla Boos. Panelists will be introduced by Kornelia Tancheva, director of the University Library System.
David Grinnell, Bill Daw and Ed Galloway in Pitt’s Archives and Special Collections department are curating the Hillman Library exhibit prior to the play launch. It will include Rediker’s contributed items including an engraving of Benjamin Lay from about 1760 and a copy of a Lay biography written by a fellow Quaker in 1815.
Rediker, a distinguished professor in Pitt’s Department of History who wrote a book about Benjamin Lay, said the American debut of “The Return of Benjamin Lay” in Lay’s adopted home state is the result of teamwork following the production’s reception in London.
“In June of ‘23, we had the world premiere of the play in London at the Finborough Theatre, a small but quite interesting theater that always sort of punches above its weight,” he said of the three-and-a-half week run. “We began to contact U.S. theaters. We wanted to do the production in the U.S.”
Among the theater representatives who responded was Boos and she wanted to do the U.S. premiere.
A creative cooperative created in 1990, Quantum lacks a dedicated facility, but stages performances at a variety of venues, many matched to a production’s theme or content.
“What Karla has done over the years is to find really interesting settings for the staging of plays in which there is usually some kind of connection between that setting and the themes of the play,” Rediker explained, calling the Braddock Carnegie Library a “great location.”
“Karla found a great room. … We wanted a place in which the, shall we say, historic struggles of a community were visible. Braddock, as a steel town that lost a lot and went through a really terrible deindustrialization, is really a great place for this play, because it’s a social justice play.”
Maverick Quaker
Lay, who Rediker called the “most fascinating historical person that most people have never heard of,” had little patience for the deliberate pace at which his fellow Quakers approached the circa-1700s movement to eradicate slavery. If slavery was indeed inhumane and went against Christian values, Lay contended, why then should it continue for a single day longer?
“Benjamin loved Quakerism,” Rediker said. “He was a very devout Quaker, but he thought Quakers were backsliding, and that wealth had become too important. Many Quakers owned slaves during his time, so he felt like he was fighting for the soul of Quakerism.”
Rediker learned of Lay’s story while writing his book, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.” He went on to write “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf.”
Since the latter book was published in 2017, the four Quaker congregations that disowned Lay for his outspokenness in the 18th century have taken him back, Rediker noted. “They have reclaimed his spirit. And that meant a lot to me, frankly … I just thought that was something that would have made him very happy.”
Rediker started working on “The Return of Benjamin Lay” with Naomi Wallace — who he called a “dear friend” and a “quite distinguished playwright” — in 2017. He has high praise for those who brought the production to life once the COVID pandemic began to dissipate.
“We started up again once things loosened up, and we began to work with a director named Ron Daniels, who is a very distinguished guy,” Rediker said. “He worked for many years in the Royal Shakespeare Company.”
Once onboard, Daniels led them to Mark Povinelli. A little person like Lay was, Povinelli was once president of what Rediker called the “very big organization” of Little People of America. “So, he’s an activist on behalf of people with dwarfism.”
‘A significant gap’
The play’s three-and-a-half week run in London was well-received, winning Best Production of the Year from the London Pub Theatre Awards. The Guardian wrote a positive editorial on the production and its historical significance.
“We had quite a number of Quakers. They’re very well organized, and they got the word out, so we saw a lot of them,” Rediker said of the “highly various” audience in London. “There was quite an interesting number of people from the Caribbean, especially from Barbados, where part of the play’s action takes place, because Benjamin lived in this leading slave society for about a year and a half.
“That’s where he actually became an abolitionist, because he saw the horrors that were inflicted upon enslaved people. And we had sort of an invitation to take the play to Barbados, and we hope to be able to do that someday. But our top priority for now was coming to the U.S.”
Following its January-February run in Braddock, “The Return of Benjamin Lay” will be staged in New York beginning March 14, and Philadelphia starting May 1.
“So the next six months, we’ll have runs in three different American cities.”
Rediker said he’s hopeful that American audiences, who “live with the effects” of slavery every day, will connect as, or more, deeply than those who caught the production in England.
“I hope so, but I don’t know for sure, because … even though scholars have done extraordinary work over the past 50 years or so on the issue of American slavery, there’s still a significant gap between the scholarship and public knowledge,” he noted. “But we think it’s a timely play.
“It’s about a man who showed great conviction and courage saying things that were not popular in his era.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.