The School of Communications, Media and the Arts will sponsor a bus and 55 tickets for students to see the new play "Possessing Harriet," which connects with local history, at Syracuse Stage on Sunday, Nov. 4.
This bus will leave Marano Campus Center at noon and return to campus after the show (by 6 p.m.). There is no cost for participating students.
The play takes place in 1839, when Harriet Powell, a young, mixed-race, enslaved woman slips away from a hotel in Syracuse, and escapes from the Southerner who “owns” her. With the aid of a mysterious free black man named Thomas Leonard, Harriet finds temporary safe harbor in an attic room at the home of impassioned abolitionist Gerrit Smith.
With the slave catchers in pursuit, Harriet spends the hours before her nighttime departure on the dangerous journey to Canada in the company of Smith’s young cousin Elizabeth Cady, an outspoken advocate for women’s equality. Confronted with new and difficult ideas about race, identity and equality, and with confusion, fear and desperation multiplying, Harriet is forced to the precipice of radical self-re-imagination and a reckoning with the heartrending cost of freedom.
The piece is a world premiere by award-winning playwright and Syracuse Stage associate artistic director Kyle Bass.
In addition to tying into the history of Central New York, the play’s reference to Gerrit Smith represents an Oswego connection. Smith was a prominent businessman, politician and orator who earned much of his fortune through trade coming via the Oswego Harbor. Smith conceived of and funded the historically significant Oswego Public Library, which was constructed in the 1850s and remains in use with its distinctive castle-like design on East Second Street.
Students can sign up via Google form for the trip. Students who register will be contacted in the week before the performance to confirm.