The Fugitive Slave Act gets personal at the Coterie
Law of the land or moral law? Given the choice, which do you follow?
Judge Loring’s choice in the case of Anthony Burns, in 1850s Boston, is a central issue in the Coterie Theatre’s thought-provoking And Justice for Some: The Freedom Trial of Anthony Burns, one that members of its student audience must themselves judge at the end of a Q&A forum that closes out the performance. But the rightness or wrongness of Loring’s ruling, and questions surrounding constitutional law versus God’s law — still discussed in politics today — resonate with adults as well.
It’s 1854 when this true story takes place, and the Fugitive Slave Act dictates that an escaped slave in one state can be arrested and returned to his or her slaveholder in another. This doesn’t sit well with the growing abolitionist movement. In And Justice for Some, we witness the predicament of Burns, a man born into slavery in Virginia who is caught after escaping to Boston at age 19.
We quickly become absorbed in the tug of war between anti-slavery forces and the judge put in charge of following the rule of law. The play, written by Wendy Lement and Bethany Dunakin and directed here by Jeff Church, excels in simplifying what could be complicated machinations of opposing parties and judicial filings, and keeps our focus on central matters: Burns, the citizens supporting his cause, and the forces working against his freedom.
This Coterie and UMKC Theatre co-production features an ensemble of seven — MFA students who do fine work. Edwin Brown III, as Burns, communicates a man desperate to remain in Boston but trapped in a potentially no-win system. The other six actors — Mariem Diaz, Daniel Fleming, Maya Loren Jackson, Josh LeBrun, Michael Thayer and Caroline Vuchetich — portray a multitude of characters (a casting that’s fluid in gender and race), in addition to their central roles, including the judge (Jackson), defense lawyer Richard Henry Dana (Thayer), slaveholder Col. Suttle (LeBrun), and the play’s narrator (Fleming, who impressed the audience with his quick transformation into a succession of witnesses).
The script makes clever use of the historical record, including trial information and accounts of the social unrest around Burns’ imprisonment, to draw the whole picture, with the actors moving seamlessly between scenes and personas with energy and charisma. (The student audience at the performance I attended had no problem with women portraying men but giggled when men portrayed women.)
If the aim of this play is to spur people to think, it succeeds. While student follow-ups at the end-of-show Q&A pertained mostly to the actors and their techniques, I was left wondering what ultimately became of Burns and Loring. Because their stories don’t end at this play’s denouement but remain part of this country’s long and tumultuous racial history.
