On August 16, 2026, we celebrated the closing of the world premier of my new play “JINNY and CATO”, produced in partnership with Plays in Place and Historic Deerfield.

JINNY AND CATO follows the story of a mother and son enslaved in the Ashley household in 1770s Deerfield. It asks the question of what it was like to be living amidst growing tensions that would lead to the American Revolution, as poles are mounted in the name of “liberty,” while you yourself are living in bondage, with no freedom in sight. Indeed, it wouldn’t come for a near century. While Jinny and Cato certainly didn’t have this foresight, Jinny was very determined to make an eventual return, either in body or spirit, to her home in Guinea, where she was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a teenager — an experience she remembers well. We ask — what was her relationship to the land she had lived on now for over 30 years? What about her son, Cato, who was born into bondage, but on North American soil, and who served on the side of the British in the French and Indian War? An interruption in a narrative about the wealthy white elites with names you might have heard of, in JINNY AND CATO, we finally hear the voices of those you haven’t.