Subtract 285 from the year 1904 and you’ll note that Aunt Ester was born in 1619, the year in which the first enslaved Africans arrived in what would become the United States of America. The older man escaped enslavement to Canada by the Underground Railway many years ago, only to immediately return to the United States to help others – and his mission still persists even after the law has ostensibly changed.īut what lifts Wilson’s play up into a top tier of theatrical writing is that otherworld odyssey Citizen goes on in the second act without ever leaving Aunt Ester’s parlour – one assisted in this production by the hidden secrets of Camellia Koo’s set. Meanwhile, Solly Two Kings (David Alan Anderson), a regular visitor to Aunt Ester’s who restlessly roams the land with a walking stick, refuses to be free while others still are not. Though Gem of the Ocean takes place forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, few of the Black characters in the play feel free.Ĭitizen, his name reflecting a post-slavery optimism that Jim Crow would quickly peck away at, has escaped outright oppression in his home state of Alabama only to find himself in indentured servitude at a mill in Pennsylvania. But the exact nature of the crime weighing on his conscience only comes out slowly.
One day, Citizen (Nathanael Judah) shows up seeking her help, confessing that he has killed a man. Aunt Ester is known as a “washer of souls” in the local Black community, sometimes claiming to be 285 years old.
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