This Tuesday across the pond at London’s Finborough Theatre, a one-man play co-written by University of Pittsburgh history professor Marcus Rediker will open, shedding light on an abolitionist “far ahead of his time.”
Benjamin Lay, a Quaker reformer who confronted slavery and practiced feminism and vegetarianism long before those terms became well known, was “the most fascinating historical person that most people have never heard of,” according to Rediker.
Why is this? First of all, the Quakers disowned him — in both London and his hometown of Abington, Pa. The premise of “The Return of Benjamin Lay” is Lay coming back nearly 300 years after his death to stand in front of the Quakers who ousted him and suppressed his voice and ask that he be readmitted.
Another major factor behind his obscurity was the historians who created the narrative of abolition.
“That movement, according to almost all the stories of abolition, was a project of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, where these middle– and upper-class gentlemen imagine that it was just inhumane for the slave system to continue to operate. I mean there’s some truth to that, but Benjamin Lay doesn’t fit that story,” Rediker said.
Instead of a wealthy intellectual philosophizing about freedom and enlightenment from a Parisian salon, Lay was a working-class man with dwarfism.
Rediker originally discovered Lay’s story while working on a different project. He decided that the man “shouldn’t just be lumped into another book” — so “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf ” was born.
Telling this tale fits into Rediker’s commitment to telling history from below. This type of history approaches narratives from the perspective of marginalized people — such as women, workers and people of color — rather than those who held power. (Rediker’s books, including “The Slave Ship: A Human History,” have won awards including the George Washington Book Prize; his next one is about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America.)
As a self-taught thinker, Lay took pride in being a lone wolf in his ideas and activism. He would often depict himself as a prophet, howling that “terrible things are going to happen to you if you don’t listen to me.” In reality, Rediker said, many of Lay’s fellow working-class Quakers agreed with him but didn’t have the courage to speak out publicly against slave-owning leaders. Lay made it his mission to embolden these workers.
Lay himself was nothing if not bold, sometimes even “impossible” in his convictions, according to Rediker, going on rants, disrupting meetings and confronting slave owners. In one wild anecdote, he took a sword and stabbed it into a Bible containing a bladder of red liquid to make a point.
“He was a difficult person,” Rediker said, “because he was sure that he was right about these things. And you know what? He was.”
While Rediker’s play is a major step in correcting Lay’s legacy, it emerged from more controversy — this time, in the modern day. Rediker and his co-writer, Naomi Wallace, were set to give a joint lecture in Berlin at a 2017 conference called “Now Is the Time of Monsters: What Happens After Nations.” They had the idea of having an actor dressed as Lay interrupt the lecture midway through in his typical fashion. At first, Rediker said, the lecture organizers seemed to like the idea. But they weren’t fans of putting an actor with dwarfism on stage.
“It became clear that they were very nervous about putting a dwarf actor on the stage. In the meantime, I’m talking with activists in the Little People of America organization, and they say, ‘Not surprising. We make people very nervous.’”
Once the LPA withdrew its support for the presentation, Wallace and Rediker withdrew from the conference in protest. They decided to develop the monologue they had written into a full-length one-man play that became “The Return of Benjamin Lay.”
During the writing process, Wallace and Rediker incorporated Shakespearean elements with the help of director Ron Daniels, as well as Quaker and maritime speech patterns. They blended all these elements together for “social realism” but made sure the end result was accessible and modern enough for the audience to understand.
The play stars LPA President Mark Povinelli, who is almost the exact same size as Lay, a “perfect fit” in more ways than one.
“I was talking with Mark Povinelli in rehearsal the other day, and he says, ‘When was the last time you saw a little person on the stage telling his story to the world?’ And the truth is probably never.”
The modern-day Quakers’ response to Rediker’s work has shifted quickly. Initially, the Abington Quakers invited him to give a talk before his book was published, which sparked a heated debate in the group about whether to readmit Lay. Two years later, in 2018, when the book was published, the Quakers revisited the matter.
“They created a minute on their record in which they said, ‘We embrace the radical spirit of Benjamin Lay. He was right. The people who persecuted him were wrong. And he is now with us,’” Rediker said. “Then, miraculously, all the other Quaker congregations that disowned him followed suit. Now the Quakers have really embraced him.”
Delaney, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is a Union Progress summer intern. Reach her at dparks@unionprogress.com.