Theatre Development Fund – TDF: When Southern Promises premiered in New York in 2008, Barack Obama was on the brink of becoming the country's first black President. That provided an optimistic backdrop for Thomas Bradshaw's incendiary play about slavery. Even though it featured raw scenes of rape and brutality, it had a somewhat happy ending, inspired by the real-life saga of Henry "Box" Brown, a Virginia slave who successfully shipped himself to abolitionists in the North in a wooden crate.
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This article talks about a technique that is so unique and capable to unravel so many new things and thoughts.
We have always seen white people as slave owners to the point that we take it for granted that they were the only ones who were slave owners. It has become a sort of convenience. But what this article forces us to do is to replace that perception of ours with black slave owners ,a concept that I have never really though about.
The reasoning that the director has for this adaptation explains the innumerable opportunities that actors and audiences would have by the portrayal and visual of such a scenario. The scenario of being tyrannized by your own race is such a novel yet unexplored concept that this article just seems to fill that gap in the current conversation about this in the field. This might just open doors to a new type of genre in the field.
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