Plays

My performance-in-progress is based on the story of Frances Slocum, a 5-year-old Quaker girl, kidnapped in 1778 by the Lenape, married into the Miami in 1795, and in 1837, reunited with her Slocum siblings, who found her in Indiana, the revered widow of a chief. They entreated her to return to Pennsylvania and “civilization.” She refused, living out the rest of her life with her people. Her story was popularized through epic poems, ballads, family memoirs, historical studies, children’s books, melodramas, and public pageants.

I came to the American Antiquarian Society in the Fall of 1995 to research and write a play called Sockdology about the actors who were in Our American Cousin the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater. I didn’t know quite what to expect when I arrived, what the AAS routines and rhythms would be. Most of the other fellows were engaged in research of a more traditional kind, or at least for more traditional kinds of projects: books, studies, etc.