Coming out of a massive renovation, Gunston Arts Center’s Theater Two plays host to an old tale.
American Century Theatre, which specializes in producing important but infrequently performed plays from the 20th Century, reaches back to the 19th Century for it’s adaptation of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," to give audiences a chance to experience the emotions felt during the final decade of slavery.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pre-Civil War novel captured popular attention in the 1850s, much as "Gone With the Wind" did in the 1930s, and brought the term "Uncle Tom" and the name Simon Legree to the American vocabulary. A dramatization of the novel was a hit for decades much as "Gone With the Wind" held the box office record for decades.
Stowe’s novel was seen as being instrumental in bringing an end to the evils of "the peculiar institution" of human chattel. When Abraham Lincoln met her in the 1860s, he reportedly said, "So this is the little lady who started this big war."
Jack Marshall, the artistic director of The American Century Theater revised the original play with playwright and actor Tom Fuller. Marshall also co-directs the production with Helen Hayes Award nominated director Ed Bishop.
Marshall and Fuller attempted to strip much of the melodrama from the original adaptation, in order to more accurately reflect the spirit and content of Stowe’s original novel.
For example, the famous scene in which Eliza, an escaping slave, flees over the Ohio River by jumping along ice floes took only three paragraphs in the novel. But it became one of the indelible images from the play. In American Century’s staging, the scene is brief but memorable.
The famous story is actually two divergent plots, which split after a shared beginning and reunite only at the end.
One subplot follows Eliza and her son Harry, who flee from slavery when their master decides to sell the son but not the mother. Their flight to freedom requires passage along the Underground Railroad from Kentucky to Canada due to laws that required return of runaway slaves, even if they were found in Free states.
The other plotline follows Uncle Tom, who refuses to flee when his owner decides to sell him. He suffers the consequences as he is sold "down river" again and again, ever further from possible salvation and into ever worsening conditions. He ends up in the hands of Simon Legree, a plantation owner so thoroughly evil that he brags of toughening his hands by beating his slaves.
Stowe used the two threads of the story to present the different problems with the South’s "peculiar institution." She graphically captured the injustice done to the human beings when they were reduced to chattel. But she also portrayed the corrosive effect that system had on all those it touched.
Making contemporary audiences understand this, from an intellectual standpoint and on an intensely personal level, requires the ability to engage the mind and the emotions as only a work of art can do.
Marshall and his collaborators use the art of theater to do just that and it makes for an affecting experience. Witnessing the cacophony of a slave market can be doubly disturbing when the human beings being sold and the human beings doing the selling are all people you have come to know onstage. Such is the magic of theater.
Many members of the 22-person cast stand out in this production, but none so much as actress Jack Baker, handling the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was not a character in the original play, but this adaptation includes her as a narrator who explains in frighteningly contemporary terms just why she wrote the story, and her view of the consequences of slavery’s evils.
Every line spoken by Baker as Harriet Beecher Stowe comes directly from her writings of 1851. It is sobering to realize that none of these lines were written in 2001 or 2002 as we struggle with the impacts of terrorist attacks and the residues of historic injustices.