“SOJOURNER”: Performances are underway for “Sojourner.” Written by Richard Lamont Pierce, and performed by Zuhairah McGill, “Sojourner” plays its final performance on July 18 at Passage Theatre. Above: Sojourner Truth (Zuhairah) recounts her experiences as a former slave who became an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, author, and public speaker. (Photo by Scott Miller)
By Donald H. Sanborn III
Passage Theatre is presenting Sojourner, a powerful and thematically resonant play that deserves to be more widely known and performed. By turns devastating and uplifting, the one-performer show lets Sojourner Truth — a former slave turned abolitionist, women’s rights activist, author, and public speaker — tell her life story.
Born as Isabella Bomefree, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth on Pentecost Sunday in 1843. The National Women’s History Museum’s website explains, “She declared that the Spirit had called her to preach the truth.”
Written by award-winning author and playwright Richard LaMonte Pierce, and performed by Barrymore Award-winning actress Zuhairah McGill (identified as Zuhairah in the program), Sojourner simulates a stream-of-consciousness conversation (an approach that conceals a deft and precise dramatic structure). The audience is assigned the role of a group of reporters who are there to interview Sojourner Truth, who is about to give a speech.
Sojourner Truth is a role that Zuhairah has been growing into and perfecting for over two decades. Sojourner premiered in 2002 at Pennsylvania’s Hedgerow Theatre Company. Zuhairah has returned to the part at numerous venues over the years.
Sojourner is being presented as part of Passage’s Word on Front 250 festival. The theater’s website states that the festival’s mission is to “celebrate the untold and undertold stories of America.”
Certainly, viewing the play a week after July 4th gives it heightened resonance and a considerable amount of bitter irony. Sojourner Truth, who was born (c. 1797) only 14 years after the end of the Revolutionary War (and lived through the Civil War) does not mince words when, early in the show, she expresses her contempt for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were slaveholders even while they were “always talking about freedom.”
Costume Designer Aetna Gallagher outfits the title character with a dress consistent with photographs taken in 1864, replete with a white scarf-cap, wire-framed glasses, and a fringed knit shawl.
With the lighting, Jairous L. Parker Sr.’s sound design aids in demarcating flashbacks and scenes set in the show’s present. The sound design also is responsible for broadcasting dialogue that other characters, all offstage, deliver to Sojourner Truth. (The lighting supervisor is Jordan Pelovitz,)
Other than a screen on which a historic photo of the real Sojourner Truth is projected, there is no set (nor is one needed, as the dialogue and performance make the time and place settings vivid). The stage is economically furnished with a bench, a rocking chair, a table on which a teapot and cup are placed, and a suitcase whose painful contents are revealed late in the play.
Zuhairah’s use of movement and body language is equally sparing and precise. Sojourner Truth (who at the time the play is set is in her later years) enters, slowly and deliberately. Only after she has inspected the tea and furniture, and comfortably seated herself, does she greet and address the audience. Initially she is quite affable, belying the wry bluntness, pain, righteous fury, and determined defiance that she soon will express.
Sojourner’s success as a work of drama derives from three primary accomplishments. First, it conveys a considerable amount of biographical information (covering approximately 60 years) in about 90 minutes. Second, the script and performance force us to confront slavery’s (interconnected) physical and psychological effects on one human being. More generally, Sojourner vividly portrays responses the mind and body can have to trauma that has been experienced earlier in life.
Born into slavery (in Swartekill, N.Y.), Sojourner Truth remembers being sold off by the widow of her first master. She describes being placed on a platform and being examined by potential buyers. Eventually she was sold, separating her from her brother.
She vividly recalls one of the first times she was physically abused, when she was about 9 years old. Because her first language was Dutch, and the wife of her second master spoke English, Sojourner Truth misunderstood an order. As a consequence, she was beaten. Out of instinctive self-protection, she put up her hand, which was forced into a boiling pot, and held there until “I fainted from the pain.”
That she still feels that pain as a much older woman is made clear by Zuhairah’s portrayal, both in her voice and her body language (she protectively holds her hand, which is clenched into a fist, close to her stomach). A bit later, Sojourner Truth remembers having fun singing and dancing with sailors — but then abruptly stops and looks meaningfully at her hand.
Sojourner Truth’s heroism stems from her refusal to allow her pain to defeat her. On the contrary, she draws strength from it, using it to rise up and fight. She recalls seeing chained Africans disembarking a slave ship (a moment that is enhanced by Karen Smith’s drum sounds). One of the slaves puts up a fight and is shot, his body thrown in the water. Sojourner Truth recalls that the incident made her determined to be free.
Once the state of New York enacted Emancipation, she demanded that her last master, John Dumont, free her. When he refused (and beat her, and also beat her children for trying to help her), she fled with her infant daughter.
Later she discovered that her son Peter had been illegally sold. Taking the issue to the New York Supreme Court, she successfully sued Peter’s new owner to have him returned to her. She recalls that Peter’s illegal master struck her in fury; and she got up and repeatedly beat him right back — avenging her pain and loss, and that of everyone she had seen hurt or killed.
For this segment, Zuhairah infuses the now older Sojourner Truth with vocal and physical strength that belies her years and comparative frailty. Zuhairah lets her voice and movements become animated, even manic, as she convincingly portrays Sojourner Truth letting herself feel her full power for the first time. The moment is pivotal — as is a later experience of seeing the conditions of a prison to which Peter later is consigned after he gets arrested.
Eventually Sojourner Truth describes her activism. She publishes a book, and becomes a public speaker, delivering her famous “Ain’t I a woman?” speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. In the 2010s essays about theater increasingly called on the medium to explore intersectionality (the link between racial and gender justice). On that level, in depicting Sojourner Truth’s speech, Pierce’s script arguably is about a decade ahead of its time.
Sojourner Truth meets Frederick Douglass, with whom she initially has contentious discussions, leading to one of the show’s wittiest one-liners. (Later, Douglass is redeemed when he takes her to church when she is at a particularly low point and, in one of the play’s most moving scenes, the music of the Fisk Jubilee Singers envelops her, and us.) She also meets President Lincoln, whose first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation she is emboldened to criticize.
At one point she shows us a mirror given to her by Dumont’s wife, so that she could see “how ugly I was.” But, “all I see is the hurt, the pain, and the tears.” The apparent metaphor is perhaps a bit obvious, but nonetheless powerful: Pierce seems to be letting Sojourner Truth force the audience to look in a mirror, and see the “pain, and the tears” that reflect America’s tortured relationship with race.
The play also seems to be offering us a choice. Will we allow that pain to defeat us, or will we — not unlike Sojourner Truth herself — use that pain, and the lessons that she is teaching us, to start on a long journey toward healing?
Sojourner originally was only scheduled to play at Passage this past weekend. Fortunately, unexpected circumstances have necessitated rescheduling one of the performances, so that the run now concludes July 18. Readers are strongly encouraged to take advantage of this change; and see a vivid, superlative performance of a well-crafted and compelling script.
“Sojourner” plays its final performance at Passage Theatre in the Mill Hill Playhouse, 205 East Front Street in Trenton, on July 18 at 7 p.m. For tickets and further information, call (609) 392-0766 or visit passagetheatre.org.