TWAM Digs Drama Out of History
By Ben Gunter
Theater with a Mission (TWAM) is premiering a new play this month. Tales from the Territorial Legislature takes you back to 1824 and makes you a member of the first Florida legislature to convene in Tallahassee. Part of Tallahassee’s Bicentennial commemoration, this immersive encounter with Florida’s multicultural history brings you face-to-face with hot-button debates about topics that still shape our dreams, fears, and freedoms today – laws about elections, laws about land sales, and laws about race relations.
How does TWAM build a dramatic reconstruction that connects 1824 to 2024? How does TWAM dig drama out of history? Three steps are critical to this process.
First, you dig up the dirt – you sift through forgotten memoirs to find shocking scandals, juicy gossip, and heated debates from 200 years ago. To recapture 1824 feelings about land laws, for example, TWAM dug up an eyewitness account of Florida Territory’s land sales from Prince Achille Murat, Napoleon’s nephew, who emigrated to Florida just in time to become a bigwig in Territorial Tallahassee. One of the characters Murat spotlights in his land-sale story is a squatter, who “has been laboring all the year that he may buy the land upon which his house is situated. Perhaps for want of a dollar or two it will be taken from him by greedy speculators.” When a speculator “offers to withdraw his pretensions for the sum of three dollars,” the squatter pays, “not doubting that the jobber cannot now bid against him. This is called hush-money.” TWAM calls this story about hush-money really good dirt.
Second, you map out the field – you connect the good dirt you’ve dug up with respectable testimony from laws and history books. Researching Tallahassee land sales, for example, TWAM found an 1824 law “To provide for the laying off the town of Tallahassee and the sale of the Lots therein,” which lays out a detailed system for appointing and paying commissioners to oversee surveying and selling lots in Tallahassee, making sure “That the money arising from sale of said lots shall be exclusively appropriated to the erection of public buildings” like the Capitol. We also found a notation in Bertram Groene’s Ante-Bellum Tallahassee about specific kinds of cash that were authorized for land-sale payments: “bills from the bank of the United States, bills from incorporated banks in Boston, Baltimore, and Richmond, and bills from the specie-paying banks in Louisiana and Alabama.” This historical context provides precise detail for mapping out a suspenseful dramatic reconstruction of a Territorial land sale.
Third, you step into the moment – you imagine what the people at that 200-year-old land sale want and what stands in their way. In TWAM’s reconstruction, for example, Murat’s anonymous squatter becomes Annie Anonymous, a poor woman who wants to buy Lot 12 because “That’s where my house stands, with kitchen, barn, and servants’ quarters as outbuildings.” Annie pays flashy speculator Jobber Grabber $3 in hush-money not to bid on her lot. She protests “There ought to be a law” when he outbids her anyway, and she ends the scene triumphantly (decking the speculator with her purse) when the auctioneer voids the sale because Jobber Grabber tries to pay with bills from specie-banks in Georgia, a kind of currency not authorized for closing a land sale in Florida Territory.
TWAM’s Tales from the Territorial Legislature premieres for the Florida Historical Society’s Public History Forum on Thursday, May 16, in the Historic Capitol Museum. You can learn more about this brand-new Bicentennial play – which is available to tour to your town this summer – by visiting Theater with a Mission’s website (www.theaterwithamission.com) and following TWAM on FB, IG, X, and Tik-Tok.
