Based on a True Story

This historical play is based on real-life events and real people. The African Company (1816-1823) was the first black acting company in the United States. William Brown, the manager, was a native of the West Indies and had been a ship’s steward before moving to New York and establishing the African Grove, a tea garden where free blacks could dance and promenade like their white counterparts. Brown’s acting company included James Hewlett, “the first outstanding black actor of the American stage,” and Ira Aldridge, who went on to international fame in Europe. Not much is known about Hewlett’s origins as there are two conflicting stories: 1) Hewlett was an escaped slave from the West Indies or 2) Hewlett was born a free black in Long Island. After the African Theatre closed in 1823, he performed throughout the eastern states and in England.

Stephen Price, the manager of the Park Theatre, was born in New York City to parents who supported the British in the Revolutionary War. Price graduated from Columbia University and trained to be a lawyer before going into theatrical management. In 1808, Price bought a share in the Park Theatre and became the co-manager with Thomas Cooper. Together, they built the reputation of the Park Theatre by bringing in hit plays and stars from the London stage. When Cooper retired in 1815, Price became the sole manager. He took yearly trips to England to search for new talent and, in 1825, became the manager of the prestigious Drury Lane Theatre in London.

The two companies really did clash in 1822 when the African Company staged Richard III at a hotel near the Park Theatre. The cast members were arrested on “trumped-up charges” and were released after promising never to perform near the Park Theatre again. The last known performance of The African Company was William Brown’s original play King Shotaway (1823), the first original drama written by a black American.

Slavery in New York

When our play begins, in 1821, slavery had only been outlawed in New York for about 20 years. Nonetheless, 1,446 slaves remained in the city in 1810 and as late as 1820, 518 were still registered. At the time of the play, nearly 11,000 free blacks lived in New York. However, they were under constant threat due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. New York passed personal liberty laws, which aimed to prevent free blacks and runaway slaves from being captured by slave catchers and taken to slavery in the south without a fair hearing and clear evidence of their former bondage.

Many free black residents lived in southern Manhattan near the docks or in the Five Points (just north of City Hall and the Park Theatre), a notorious multi-ethnic neighborhood combining Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants with the free black population. In the 1820s, a gang known as the Blackbirders operated in the Five Points, seizing both fugitive slaves and free blacks living there. Therefore, the characters in our play – especially those who were escaped slaves – lived in danger of being captured and taken into slavery.

“Spain is, at all times, stirred by the duende, country of ancient music and dance, where the duende squeezes out those lemons of dawn, a country of death, a country open to death. In every other country death is an ending. It appears and they close the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.” ~ Federico García Lorca

Duende and Blood Wedding

The 1933 premiere of Blood Wedding, written by Federico García Lorca, was an immediate success. On opening night, the theatre was filled to capacity with Spain’s leading critics, intellectuals, and artists. Merging surrealist poetry and art with a real-life rural tragedy, Lorca created a thrillingly new piece of theatre.

The concept of “duende” is of supreme importance to Lorca’s imagination. Originally the term referenced a small, mischievous house-goblin. The name of this sprite was derived from the phrase “dueño de casa,” the “possessor of a house.” But for Lorca, duende was a darker and more pervasive spirit which permeated the Spanish imagination. For Lorca, the duende was “the buried spirit of saddened Spain” which infused all of the arts. The supreme embodiment of duende is in the Gypsy or flamenco dancers, singers, and musicians of Lorca’s native Andalucía. Lorca knew the fiery passion of flamenco was “impossible without the arrival of the duende.” Duende also allowed artists to dive into their unconscious creative imagination, fueled by the inspiration of their blood and of the natural beauty of Spain.

Lorca’s Spain

Lorca wrote Blood Wedding during a time of monumental change in Spain. To avoid the threat of Communism, General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s military dictatorship took over the country in the 1920s. As in the U.S., Spain suffered a stock market crash in 1929 which sent the country spiraling into an economic depression. This led to the end of Rivera’s reign and caused the King, Alfonso XIII, to flee to Rome. In 1931, the Second Spanish Republic, led by Alcala Zamora, was established as the ruling party. During the years of the Second Republic, there was increasing violence between liberals and conservatives until the country erupted into civil war in 1936.

Women in Lorca’s Spain

Spanish women had few rights in the 1930s, but with the advent of the Second Republic, it looked like change was possible. In 1931, women were given new rights that were unprecedented in Spain’s history, such as the right to vote. By 1932, new laws were passed regarding divorce and civil marriage. Women were given full legal status, abortion was legalized, and the crime of adultery was abolished. However, the rise of Francisco Franco’s fascist government came right on the heels of these progressive laws. Society began to constrict again. In the play, we see the Bride struggling with her lack of rights, paired with the narrow role she could play in her rural, Catholic community. Her conflict between the strictures of society and her heart’s passion reflected Lorca’s own struggle as a gay man in a repressive culture.

William Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, his bloodiest play, early in his career. With the highest body count of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Titus is a prime example of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. During the 1580s and early 1590s, when Shakespeare was writing and producing Titus, revenge was a key topic of plays and essays. Plays such as The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, The Revengers Tragedy by Thomas Middleton, and Antonio’s Revenge by John Marston were gory and sensationalist. They were also enormously popular with audiences. In Titus, young Shakespeare is clearly mimicking the techniques (and borrowing plot points) from his fellow playwrights. By following their model, Shakespeare wrote a blockbuster. Titus was hugely popular, being printed in three different editions during his lifetime and often revived for the stage.

All revenge tragedies followed familiar tropes. A good young man was spurred to revenge by a wrong done to him by a Machiavellian villain. At some point in the play, the deed would be shown in a dumb show, or be described by a ghost. Protagonist and antagonist would share their thoughts through soliloquies. The young man would adopt disguises — one of which was madness (either genuine or feigned). He (and others) would undergo physical torment and experience sudden reversals in fortune. Generally, in a revenge tragedy, there is a clear villain and a virtuous avenging hero, but that is not the case with Titus. As in many of his other plays, in Titus Shakespeare takes the form of a revenge tragedy and amplifies it. At one point, everyone in this play is motivated by revenge.

Why was revenge such a popular topic during this period? Perhaps it had to do with public executions, which were a common occurrence and were often gruesome and theatrical. Audiences traveling across the Thames to Shakespeare’s theatre would have passed the heads of executed prisoners displayed on the bridge. In a world where plague and death were common, it was perhaps a desire to assign blame to a singular “evil” person. Perhaps it has to do with concepts of justice in light of brutal monarchs. Mary I (1516-1558), known as “bloody Mary” for her executions of Protestant religious dissenters in her Catholic reign. Then when Protestant Elizabeth I (1533-1603) gained the throne, she was equally brutal to Catholics. Could Elizabeth’s actions be seen as justice or as revenge? In his 1597 essay, “On Revenge,” Francis Bacon referred to revenge as “a kind of wild justice” which can be in opposition to the law, or can help to restore rightful order of the land.

Revenge tragedy reached its pinnacle with Hamlet. The plot is classic revenge tragedy, from the ghost returning from the grave seeking vengeance, to the dumbshow of the murder in the play-within-the play, to the pile of corpses at the end. Yet, in Hamlet, Shakespeare transformed a lurid, gruesome form of theatre into a poetic meditation on humanity’s relationship with death.

Ayad Akhtar (1970- ) is a first-generation Pakistani-American actor, novelist, and playwright who works in both theatre and film. In all of his work, Akhtar seeks to illuminate the Muslim-American experience and to explore modern America’s complicated relationship with Islam. In his (often autobiographical) writing, Akhtar investigates how the children of immigrants form their own identities both within and away from their parents’ religions. Akhtar, describes himself as a “cultural Muslim,” or an individual who, as a child, was “formed and informed by the spirituality of the Muslim tradition without believing in the literal truths of any of its tenets.” (Newsweek). This part of Akhtar’s experiences is reflected in Amir, the main character of Disgraced.

The set-up for Disgraced is sounds like a worn joke: a Muslim, a Jew, an African-American lawyer, and a white artist sit down to dinner. The conversations that develop between the characters over dinner (and many drinks) are Akhtar’s answer to the ongoing discussion about the role of Islam in a post-9-11 America. He takes us on a journey into the mindset of those affected by Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, regardless of their religious background. Though this, he shows us that there is not one single idea or ideology that defines Islamic identity.

Akhtar has received both praise and criticism for writing deeply complicated Muslim American characters. In Disgraced, as in the rest of his work, he engages with the great American literary tradition of the anti-hero, creating Muslim characters who are both sympathetic and deeply flawed. In this way, he challenges his community and the country at large. But, he is wary of being seen as the voice of American Muslims. Rather, it is his goal to “keep telling really great stories and hopefully enough people catch on, and they're like, 'You know what? It's not about that. It's about something else, like being human.’” (cbsnews.com)

Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 2012 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work, a 2013 Obie Award for playwriting, and even a Tony nomination in 2014, and is currently the most produced play in the United States.

“It’s a new style, it’s whatever we wanna be

So welcome, welcome, welcome, to the Bomb-itty!”

At the heart of The Bombity of Errors is a hip-hop aesthetic that unites the rhythms of Shakespeare’s language with modern beats. Hip-hop began as a New York subculture which fused the musical styles of African-Americans and Latinos in an effort to break down racial barriers. The musical block parties of the Ghetto Brothers in the early 1970s are considered by many to be the beginning of hip-hop. But, the term “hip-hop” didn’t become widely associated with the musical movement until the 1979 song “Rapper’s Delight,” which began with the lyric “I said a hip, hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don't stop.” You will experience all of the signature elements of hip-hop in The Bombity of Errors: the actors rap and beatbox, they perform the physical tricks of b-boying or breakdance, a DJ spins turntables, and the set features graffiti-inspired art.

The adaptation of Shakespeare into a hip-hop musical is a perfect example of the hip-hop art of sampling. In sampling, the hip-hop artist takes a portion of a well-known piece of music and repurposes it. This can be the beat, or a signature tune, or select words or phrases. Through sampling, Bombity explodes the idea of the playwrights that “Shakespeare’s work is malleable and open to interpretation” by mashing up Shakespeare’s language with modern vernacular. As an example, when Antipholus of Syracuse woos Luciana in Shakespeare’s play she asks him “What, are you mad, that you do reason so?” and he replies “Not mad, but mated; how, I do not know.” In Bombity she asks the same question and his reply is “Not mad, try glad. But mad? Hell no.”

Throughout the play, the authors have adapted and complicated the plot of Shakespeare’s play to heighten the comic possibilities. In Shakespeare’s play twin brothers – both named Antipholus – and their two servants – twin brothers both named Dromio – end up in the same town and are mistaken for each other throughout one wacky day. In Bombity, the mistakes are amplified as the four men are quadruplets and only four actors play all of the characters in the play.