Anna Deavere Smith’s This Ghost of Slavery at Wesleyan

With her newest play, This Ghost of Slavery, Anna Deavere Smith combines her signature interview-based documentary theater with research into the archives of American slavery. Exploring the deep roots of historical trauma as it persists in the present, the play also considers how performance might provide new ways of understanding the collective stories we tell ourselves as individuals and as a nation.

Set in Baltimore and Annapolis, the story is set within a college campus and moves between the 1860s and the present as actors play multiple roles. Drawing from interviews with social justice workers associated with the nonprofit organization Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile justice system, Smith weaves these contemporary voices with primary research in 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries (especially on “apprenticeship laws”) to extend her examination of the school-to-prison pipeline to the long legacy of American slavery.

Performed by a cast that includes professional actors and undergraduate artists at Wesleyan University, this staged reading will be followed by a discussion. This event marks the first in a series of engagements that Smith, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence, is devising with the Center for the Arts to further examine performance as a way of knowing.

For more information.