In 1831, Nat Turner, the leader of a violent slave rebellion in Virginia, was convicted of insurrection and sentenced to be “hung by the neck until you are dead! Dead! Dead.” This does not seem to have troubled him unduly. The last words of his confession, as recorded by the lawyer Thomas R Gray, were: “I am here loaded with chains, and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me.”
That’s more or less the moment that Nathan Alan Davis’s regrettably ponderous drama, Nat Turner in Jerusalem, at New York Theater Workshop, begins. The night before his execution, Turner (Phillip James Brannon), appropriately shackled, is enjoying a prayerful evening when Gray (Rowan Vickers) arrives to interrupt his solace and his sunset. Gray wants to uncover information about other rebellions in other states. But Turner has none. So the two men talk past each other. Occasionally the lights darken, stagehands shift the platform and Vickers returns dressed as a guard. These conversations are not markedly more productive.
A fascination with Turner endures, as the William Styron novel and the imminent Nate Parker film attest. The case invites contemporary audiences to engage with a grim moral argument. How do we, as allegedly enlightened auditors, reconcile the immense and systemic evils of slavery with the particular and local horrors of Turner’s uprising against it? A man who rebels against injustice, a man true to his faith, a man who stoically accepts his sentence – these are qualities associated with heroes. But who would find heroism in the slaughter of so many children?
Perhaps that debate is stashed somewhere in all the speechifying of Nat Turner in Jerusalem. If so, it becomes one more dispute that fails to catch fire. This is a play in search of its conflict. The lightly anachronistic language sits heavily in the mouths of the actors. Brannon, an equable performer with a sting in his histrionic tail, nicely underplays Turner’s fanaticism, but he rarely connects to either Vickers’s Gray or to his guard. (Vickers, a young actor, seems eager but overmatched.)
Davis has an interest in and a seeming reverence for history that doesn’t always serve him well. A playwright with a more distinctive approach to language and genre – the likes of Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks or Branden Jacobs-Jenkins – might have found surreal terror or brutal comedy in these events. But Davis’s version, under the stolid direction of Megan Sandberg-Zakian, is disappointingly static. Gray wants something; Turner can’t and won’t give it. Neither is altered, neither is persuaded and this dynamic never really changes, no matter how many biblical allusions and homilies the script provides. Gray, callow and self-satisfied, is not an especially likable character, yet he seems unusually sympathetic when he complains: “I am weary of talking in circles.”
