Maybe it’ll be different when “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” opens here in May, but actor Mark Povinelli has his theories about why it’s been such an uphill battle for his one-man show to get the recognition it deserved in London and New York.
And his theory boils down to size – his size.
Povinelli is 3 feet, 9.5 inches tall.
“What are the images that we’ve seen over centuries of Little People?” he said, using the accepted term for people with dwarfism. “The media portrayal, the general public’s perception is of a munchkin, an elf, an Oompa Loompa. And you can look back farther. We were in the freak shows, carnival shows. We were used as entertainment, but for nothing but our physical stature – to be made fun of, to be infantilized.”
“The Return of Benjamin Lay” opens May 1 at Quintessence Theatre Group’s Sedgwick Theater in Mount Airy. The story has a unique connection to Philly history.
“This is definitely a Philadelphia story,” said University of Pittsburgh historian Marcus Rediker, who wrote a biography of Benjamin Lay and collaborated with playwright Naomi Wallace to pen the play. “Everybody knew him. Everybody talked about him. Not everybody liked him.
“This story is going to be hard for Quakers,” Rediker said, “because they like to believe they were always against slavery.”
But in 1732, well over a century before the Civil War erupted over slavery, more than 50 percent of Philadelphia’s Quakers enslaved people, Rediker said, drawing on research he used in his 2017 book, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist”.
Lay’s relentless anti-slavery activism, mainly directed at the wealthiest Quakers, got him booted out of four Quaker congregations, two in Great Britain and two here – the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which is an organizing group of smaller local meetings, and the Abington Monthly Meeting in Montgomery County.
In between rehearsals, Povinelli plans to visit the historical locations, which he’s never seen, as part of a documentary being made about him and the legacy of Benjamin Lay,
Lay’s most famous activism actually happened in New Jersey, at the Burlington Meeting House, where the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was holding its 1738 annual gathering.
“He practiced what we call guerrilla theater in that he acted his ideas out in public to dramatize them,” Rediker said.
Quaker worship is generally quiet with attendees meditating in silence until they are moved to speak. Lay was more than moved.
“He went to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and he dressed as a soldier,” Rediker said. “He strapped a sword to his belt and then took an animal bladder and filled it with pokeberry juice and hid it in a book. He wore an overcoat over all of it.
“He situated himself near the wealthy Quakers who were slaveowners and at a certain point, he stood up and cast off the overcoat. Quakers were committed pacifists and here he was in a military uniform,” Rediker said.
Lay told them that God will take vengeance on those who enslave their fellow creatures. “He runs his sword through the book and then he sprinkles the ‘blood’ on slaveowners so everyone can identify them,” Rediker said.
To prepare, Povinelli, who grew up as a Catholic and served as an altar boy, attended a Quaker meeting in California, where he lives.
“It’s such a meditative and soothing communal and religious experience,” he said. “I sat there, listening and trying to fit in. Nobody had spoken yet. What would it be like if I stood up and started saying lines in the play? How wildly inappropriate it would feel! How raw it would feel.
“When you think about what Ben did, how wild and uncomfortable it would be. It would be something you would never forget,” Povinelli said.
Lay, who lived a back-to-nature lifestyle in a cave near the Abington Meeting House, became a hero to Quaker abolitionists, Rediker said. Over the last decade, both the Abington and Philadelphia Yearly meetings voted to embrace his legacy. They couldn’t officially reinstate him, since he could not be asked if he would accept the reinstatement.
Povinelli believes that Lay’s size gave him “a tremendous amount of empathy for other marginalized people,” including enslaved people.
“Benjamin, in his writings, didn’t spend much time talking about his size or his physical condition,” Povinelli said. “Based on experience and historical fact, there is no doubt that he faced a great deal of persecution and belittling and infantilism.”
Povinelli, a past president of Little People of America, an advocacy group, said he would not have been interested in the play if it were simply about a Little Person and not an outsized dynamic historical figure like Benjamin Lay.
“This person and me portraying this person is as compelling as any one-man show that you’ve seen,” Povinelli said. “My size is a contributing positive factor. It’s something you are not used to seeing and it’s interesting, but you realize how not important it is at the same time.”
Producing the play posed challenges to the Quintessence team, as it worked to make its home theater, the Sedgwick, a former movie palace, accessible to Povinelli and to Little People in the audience.
Carol Flannery, Quintessence’s marketing and communications director, headed the effort. The theater sent photos of the entire space, including the lobby, bathrooms and bar, to a consulting group.
The first suggestion was for theater personnel to evaluate surroundings by getting on their knees and seeing what they could reach with their elbows. Typically, the torsos of Little People are of average size, but their legs and arms are shorter.
High tops in the lobby where patrons gather for pre- and post-show drinks will be put in storage, replaced by lower tables. The theater will buy a dozen footstools and put them everywhere, including the bathrooms. Ushers will be stationed at the bar, able to hand drinks to patrons if necessary.
There will be a special affinity night for Little People on May 16.
“It’s so fascinating and eye-opening,” Flannery said. “We wanted to make the theater physically welcoming for guests and for Mark.”
Up next for Quintessence is “Giovanni’s Room,” a world premiere of a play based on James Baldwin’s groundbreaking1956 novel about a man’s discovery of Paris’ queer community and his own sexuality. Quintessence was granted permission by the Baldwin estate – the first such permission given – to present the play, adapted for the stage by Benjamin Sprunger and Paul Oakley Stovall. It runs May 28 through June 22.
FYI
“The Return of Benjamin Lay,” May 1-18, Quintessence Theatre Group, Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown Ave., Mt. Airy, 215-987-4450
