Nat Turner in Jerusalem
Opening Night: September 26, 2016
Closing: October 16, 2016
Theater: NY Theatre Workshop
In August 1831, Nat Turner led a slave uprising that shook the conscience of the nation. Turner’s startling account of his prophecy and the insurrection was recorded and published by attorney Thomas R. Gray. NYTW 2050 Fellow Nathan Alan Davis makes his New York debut with a timely new play that imagines Turner’s final night in a jail cell in Jerusalem, Virginia, as he is revisited by Gray and they reckon with what has passed and what the dawn will bring. Woven with vivid imagery and indelible lyricism, Nat Turner in Jerusalem examines the power of an individual’s resolute convictions and their seismic reverberations through time.
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September 26, 2016
Though he is to be hanged in the morning, before a crowd that wants nothing more than to see him die, the title character of “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” lights up the night with a luminous, faith-filled serenity. He regrets that his single, west-looking prison window will not allow him to see the next daybreak, but, as he says, “Where I am going, the sunrises are infinite.” Portrayed with a centered stillness by Phillip James Brannon in Nathan Alan Davis’s contemplative and largely inert play, which opened on Monday night at the New York Theater Workshop, Nat Turner is awaiting his execution in the town of Jerusalem, Va. But if another famous visitor to another Jerusalem — in another part of the world some 1,800 years earlier — comes to mind, that is by no means inappropriate.
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