Anna Deavere Smith: This Ghost of Slavery [SOLD OUT]

Sunday, October 27, 2024 at 3:00pm
Crowell Concert Hall

$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18.

This event is sold out. A wait list will begin at the venue at 2pm on the day of the performance.

Read Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97 Starts Yearlong Artist Residency with Staged Reading of New Work in The Wesleyan Connection.

With her newest play, This Ghost of Slavery, Anna Deavere Smith combines her signature interview-based documentary theater with research into the archives of American slavery. Exploring the deep roots of historical trauma as it persists in the present, the play also considers how performance might provide new ways of understanding the collective stories we tell ourselves as individuals and as a nation.

Set in Baltimore and Annapolis, the story is set within a college campus and moves between the 1860s and the present as actors play multiple roles. Drawing from interviews with social justice workers associated with the nonprofit organization Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile justice system, Smith weaves these contemporary voices with primary research in 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries (especially on “apprenticeship laws”) to extend her examination of the school-to-prison pipeline to the long legacy of American slavery.

Performed by a cast that includes professional actors along with faculty and undergraduate artists at Wesleyan University, this staged reading will be followed by a discussion. This event marks the first in a series of engagements that Smith, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence, is devising with the Center for the Arts to further examine performance as a way of knowing.

This Ghost of Slavery was originally written for The Atlantic magazine and published in the December 2023 issue. The work is only the second full length play published since the magazine’s first issue in 1857.

Co-produced with the Long Wharf Theatre. Co-sponsored by Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. Presented as part of the University initiative Democracy 2024 (www.wesleyan.edu/d2024).

The stellar cast includes Gbenga Akinnagbe (The Wire, The Deuce), Wynn Harmon (Live from Lincoln Center, Law & Order: SVU, Madam Secretary), Kai Heath (Great Performances, Law & Order, Much Ado About Nothing at The Public Theater), Ken Marks (The Wackness, Henry’s Crime, Side Effects), Jay O. Sanders (Kiss the Girls, The Day After Tomorrow, Edge of Darkness), and Godfrey Simmons, Jr. (Third Watch, Law & Order, Katrina).

Also joining the cast are Oak Onaodowan, known for originating the roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in Hamilton; Sojourner Brown, currently appearing in Hadestown; and Arjun Gupta, who previously starred in Nurse Jackie alongside Smith. Additional cast members include Sharaé Moultrie (Girl From the North Country national tour) and Steve Routman (Killers of the Flower Moon), both seen in Long Wharf Theatre’s concert performance of Jelly’s Last Jam, and Jolie Cloutier, previously in Long Wharf Theatre’s staged reading of Flying Bird's Diary.

From Wesleyan University, Associate Professor of Theater, African American Studies, and English Rashida McMahon, along with students Connor Wrubel ’25 (a Film Studies and Theater major) and Raimi Bagwell ’26 (an African American Studies major), will also join the cast.


The staged reading of This Ghost of Slavery at Wesleyan will be directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar and was cast by tbd casting co. 

Heath, Marks, and Sanders previously worked with Smith on an invitation-only reading of This Ghost of Slavery earlier this year. Kudtarkar previously directed a staged reading of The Elephant Is Very Like at Wesleyan in February, and a production of Queen at Long Wharf Theatre in 2022.

Read Okieriete Onaodowan, Sojourner Brown, Arjun Gupta, More Cast in This Ghost of Slavery Reading in Playbill.

RELATED EVENTS

Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Congress Keynote Conversation: Anna Deavere Smith with Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean
Saturday, October 26, 2024 at 7:30pm
Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut
Pay what you can.

The Long Wharf Theatre's Artistic Congress will feature an extraordinary Keynote Conversation with the acclaimed Anna Deavere Smith, the 2024–2025 Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts, and Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean, Wesleyan’s Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement and Executive Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and renowned host of CT Public’s “Disrupted.”

Anna Deavere Smith in conversation with Joshua Lubin-Levy: “If the theater is not the place, where?”
Monday, October 28, 2024 at 6pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall
Free admission. 

Anna Deavere Smith, the 2024–2025 Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA), will be in conversation with Joshua Lubin-Levy ’06, Director of the CFA. Their conversation “If the theater is not the place, where?” will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. Presented as part of the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities fall Monday Night Lecture Series “Dead Reckonings.”