Insurrection: Holding History

Show Description:

Struggling with his graduate thesis on slavery, Ron, a gay, black student at Columbia, attends a family reunion to celebrate his great-great-grandfather T.J.’s 189th birthday. Despite the fact that T.J. can’t move, hear, or speak, T.J. (given voice by the spirit of Mutha Wit) convinces Ron to take him back to his old home in Virginia. Fracturing the space-time continuum as they go further south, they arrive on the eve of Nat Turner’s doomed 1831 uprising to see Nat Turner himself racing through the woods. Encouraged to understand his ‘past’ in order to understand his ‘present’ and the perception-altering confrontation with what it means to be ‘free’, Ron discovers that how the authenticity of history unfolds depends on the perception of the storyteller.