The Atlantic To Publish New Anna Deavere Smith Play ‘The Ghost Of Slavery’ In Full

deadline.com:

For the first time in nearly a century, The Atlantic magazine will publish a new play: The Ghost of Slavery by Anna Deavere Smith will debut across 32 pages of the publication’s December issue.

The play, the centerpiece of a Reconstruction-themed issue, was posted on the Atlantic’s website today. The Ghost of Slavery is set in Baltimore and Annapolis in the 1860s and the present, and, according to a description provided by the magazine, explores the power of historical trauma to persist for generations.

The magazine describes the play as “a searing drama of great emotional and historical complexity set in two time periods, the effect of which is not just to bring history vividly (and at times painfully) to life, or to make plain the injustices meted out to Black Americans across centuries, but to make readers and audiences see anew the connections between past and present.” As with such acclaimed Smith plays as Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (about the Rodney King riots), the new work draws from her own contemporary interviews with activists, social-justice workers, and young people whose lives have been affected by the carceral system, or the prison industrial complex.

Examining the contemporary failures of the juvenile justice system, the play explores the origins of the problem in the aftermath of emancipation, when slaveowners in Maryland used the state’s “Black Code” to immediately re-indenture children under the guise of apprenticeship, functionally extending slavery for adolescents.