Overview
John Brown asks Harriet Tubman to fight with him to stop slavery. Her traumatic epilepsy triggered, Tubman moves through time to a modern Philadelphia prison. She meets Nelson Davis, who falls in love with her. He detains her from Harper’s Ferry; Furious, she returns to her time to mourn the failed raid. But when she’s recruited to lead the Union Army’s Combahee River Raid, she returns to the prison to recruit her spies. Davis goes back in time separately to fight Confederates and TB—and become her second husband.
Casting & Production
Casting
HARRIET TUBMAN — late 30-40s. Think Gymnast Simone Biles, trained by work with Chesapeake Black Jacks and lumbermen after a childhood of loneliness and pain.
JOHN BROWN/OFFSTAGE WHITE OFFICER — tall, thin white man who has lived a hard 58 years, but still bristles with the energy of his divine calling to stop slavery in the U.S.
NELSON DAVIS (present day) — 24 years old, a young veteran of the Coast Guard.
CHARLES NELSON DAVIS (19th Century) — 21, formerly enslaved, enlists with the U.S. Colored Troops.
EARL HOLLOWAY — 55, serving an 11-month sentence for parole violation, has been in and out of prison most of his adult life for theft and non-violent burglaries.
HARRIET’S SPY 1 — Like HARRIET, EARL is capable of disguising himself. He also has uncanny geographical intelligence.
CLAUDE — 48, corrections officer, Philadelphia Detention Center. He’s been a high-functioning, heavy-evening and day-off binge drinker for many years but loses control of his drinking when his wife declares that she’s leaving him.
HARRIET’S SPY 2 — This is the man who goes deep into the country at night to gather intelligence about enemy troops.
CHORUS (Also Guard/Driver/JOHN BROWN’s man) — Storyteller, interpreter, go-between, and guide, CHORUS carries the magic of time travel.
CHAPLAIN RAY — At 40 years old, RAY has studied nights at an urban seminary to become ordained in order to carry on this prison ministry.
HARRIET’S SPY 3 — Goes up the Combahee to talk to the enslaved people at the large plantations they plan to raid.
ABIGAIL WRIGHT (Fictional abolitionist fundraiser) — Anywhere from 30 to 70 years old, this well-to-do widow with an income supports a more radical abolition than most.
KENNEDY FARMHOUSE NEIGHBOR — A woman near the rural Maryland farmhouse five miles north of Harper’s Ferry, VA. She’s befriended JOHN BROWN’s teen-aged daughter and daughter-in-law, who moved onto the farm to cook for the men and to give the household an air of normalcy
Casting Note:
Gender, race, and age are specified.
No doubt directors will find ways to work imaginatively with gender roles in future productions. Our understanding of gender will no doubt evolve, but Tubman’s experience, her vulnerability, jeopardy, and brilliance, remain connected to the memory and legacy of her body and soul and American enslavement law and culture.
The shape-shifting Chorus, who guides the audience through time, and among characters, speaks in “iambic vernacular,” and comments on Black American history and Tubman’s struggle. He has been inspired by the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V, a play beloved by Black theater groups of the 19th Century who saw themselves as “We few…we band of brothers” fighting the American and European behemoth of slavery.
Setting
Places
St. Catharine’s, Ontario, Canada: Harriet Tubman’s house
New Bedford, MA: House of ABIGAIL WRIGHT, a fictitious donor
Washington County, MD: Kennedy Farmhouse, a few miles north of Harper’s Ferry, WV
USS John Adams: Combahee River, SC.
Philadelphia Detention Center: beween Pennnypack Creek and I-95 in Philadelphia
Times
1859-1869
The present
Reviews
“…My General Tubman will charm you with history, bloodshed, heroism, love — and magic.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“…My General Tubman gets under the skin of a complex woman and shows us the ways we still walk the path she forged. And it shows the work our society still has left to do.”
—Broad Street Review
Media
