When it comes time to choosing a show to be performed at Syracuse Stage, typically well-known performances are chosen. However, this season artistic director Bob Hupp selected the brand-new work “Possessing Harriet”. “When I read ‘Possessing Harriet’ and the great work that had been done, I felt like this was a great story that really needed to be told,” said Hupp. “It’s compelling, it’s powerful, and even though it’s about Syracuse history, it very much speaks to today.”
Playwright and Syracuse Stage’s assistant artistic director Kyle Bass received an emotional reaction from his first audience. One of the audience members “was fighting to hold back tears,” Bass said. She came up to me [after the show] and she said ‘I’m from Peterboro’ and then the minute she said the name of the town, she was inconsolable, and so she wept into me.”
While the play, commissioned by the Onondaga Historical Association, is set in the past, many of the issues are still being dealt with today. The main character Harriet, a light-skinned slave, is “the perfect dramatic vessel for identity, race, colorism and gender oppression,” Bass said.
The play serves as a mirror for spectators to both reflect on how times have changed, but also how many values remain. “You have enslaved folks, oppressed women in my play, gender and politics in 1839, and in 2018 black people still have to say ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Bass said. “We have to say that.”
“If they need a reminder of how we got to where we are, 179 years later, a play set in 1839 seems astonishingly relevant.” Bass said.
