What I liked
I love that it left me speechless with only tears to do the speaking for me.
What I didn't like
Simply nothing. It was the perfect story told by the perfect artist. Hopefully there will be more opportunities for this play to be seen again.
My overall impression
Proverbs /ˈpräˌvərb/ 22:1 “It’s better to have a good name rather than gold or silver.” But what happens when you have a good name but the evil powers that be use their power to alternate history. My favorite quote is “It isn’t the things you know to be true that hurt you, it’s the things you know to be true, that aren’t true.” Simply put, what I knew to be true about the name Uncle Tom aka Josiah Henson, may just very well have been based around evil powers damaging a super humans’s name.
This play directed, written, produced and starred in by Jeremiah Core, left me speechless. The opening will leave you completely silent. The realism is dangerously relentless, polarizing, you’re drastically unprepared for what you’re hearing and seeing. Jeremiah is vastly prepared to overwhelm you with his commitment to take you from your cozy present life and drop you into the life of Josiah Henson.
Jeremiah sets you up on an edge, way high up, with tumultuous winds and he begins pushing you around emotionally with the heartbreaking truthfulness of Josiah’s story. A kid losing his family at auction, his father to a beating and potentially his own mind to the world he’s in. As Josiah gets older his life and choices are no different, the only exception is he finds his way and his power. He has a family, he becomes free from slavery and he begins freeing over 100 others. He writes a book about his life but that becomes the thing evil powers possess to rewrite the story to make his own people turn on him; and it works.
As Jeremiah begins to paint his face and show you how they turned Josiah’s heroic name into the most shameful name in the history of a race, you begin to know what you’re witnessing and it’s something far beyond present time. It’s a performance art piece that will stay with you for a lifetime and hopefully be the first stepping stone towards giving Josiah Henson back his great name. What Jeremiah did was raw and enthralling, you walk away from this performance knowing he elevated your life by showing you what it is to lay it all out there. It was an honor to see someone give everything —
