At a time when American history and the arts are being targeted by the Trump administration, the scrappy, activism-centered Company One Theatre has ridden to the rescue of a scuttled historical play about Black women’s pivotal roles in the decades-long battle for equal rights. That drama, Miranda Austen ADEkoje’s “A New Era,” was supposed to be the second installment in “Suffrage in Black and White,” a series of ambitious, site-specific history plays about Boston’s connections with the women’s suffrage movement.
The series was developed and funded by the National Parks of Boston and the site-specific theater company Plays in Place, with the two entities collaborating on shows that would activate historical Boston spaces through storytelling that spotlights crucial chapters in the city’s history. National Park Service public historians were instrumental in the creative development of the plays, advising and and sharing insights with the playwrights, directors and actors. The first play in the series, “A Light Under the Dome,” premiered in 2024 at the Massachusetts State House Senate Chamber. But last year, the remaining shows were indefinitely postponed due to federal budget and staffing cuts and changing priorities at the National Park Service.
Now, Company One has picked up the baton from the National Parks of Boston and Plays in Place and is carrying the series forward, producing “A New Era,” at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester from July 18 to August 8, a year after it was originally scheduled to premiere as a site-specific show at King’s Chapel Parish House. The story centers on the launching of the First National Conference of Colored Women in 1895, which took place in Boston, and highlights the strategizing of seven Black women, led by renowned Boston abolitionist, suffragist, and newspaper editor Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, to build a unified coalition of women from across the country who have diverging priorities and views.
Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director at Plays in Place, says that deep budget and staffing cuts at the National Park Service driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led to a loss of funding for the series’ second installment. “The budget got greatly reduced, the staff was all shaken up, priorities drifted and many things changed,” he says. “It’s a result of the [Trump] administration changing their view on the National Park Service.” National Parks of Boston deputy superintendent Liza Stearns, who had championed the series at NPS, retired from her post, he says.
So when Company One wanted to step in and produce the play, Gabridge was thrilled. “We were like, ‘If you can do it, that would be amazing, because the story needs to get out there,’” he says. “It’s a moment that so few people have ever heard of.”
Summer L. Williams, Company One’s associate artistic director, is directing the play and was involved in its development. She says it’s a good match for Company’s One mission as a home for social justice, community building, public engagement, and for elevating marginalized and alternative narratives. “It felt like such a shame for the work on this really worthy project to be stalled,” Williams says. “And it felt like a perfect fit for us as we were thinking about our programming … in relationship to the 250th anniversary [of the nation’s birth].”
“I’m just impressed by how they walk the talk,” ADEkoje says of Company One’s commitment to “public art for public good.”
When Gabridge first recruited ADEkoje, a playwright, screenwriter, and actress, to pen a play for “Suffrage in Black and White,” he suggested a few possible characters. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, ADEkoje says, “did not appeal to me at the beginning because I was like, ‘Oh, she’s part of the Black Boston elite, and I’m more interested in working class warriors.’”
But as she read more about her trailblazing accomplishments, she was attracted to Ruffin’s passion, determination, and belief that the world could change. She had created the nation’s first newspaper by and for Black women, The Woman’s Era, that she published and edited. She founded the Woman’s Era Club and organized the first-ever national conference of Black women in 1895, in Boston, which led to the founding of the nation’s first national organization of Black women. “It’s her earnestness that made me say, ‘You know what? I can rock with this because she’s really trying.’”
Ruffin’s primary goal was to pass a law to stop lynching in the South, and her strategy was to ally with white women in the suffrage movement to enact anti-lynching legislation and eventually win the right to vote. In 1869, she had joined with abolitionists Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone to form the American Woman Suffrage Association, so she saw how forging alliances could prove successful. “Josephine’s main argument is we need to align with these white women because they’re angry and they’re fighting for the same thing,” ADEkoje says, “and if we bring our numbers to them, then they will stand with us when we’re trying to trounce lynching.”
Not all the characters agree. The Black women with roots in the South “think Josephine is living in a bit of a fantasy,” says Patrice Jean-Baptiste, who plays Ruffin. “They believe she doesn’t have a full picture of what it is to experience the atrocities of living in the South, and therefore her insistence on connecting with white women is laughable, and in fact offensive and foolish.”
But Ruffin, Williams says, “grasped the power of a multiracial approach. She understood the power of people banding together for what’s necessary to make change ... Black women have always been about building coalitions for the betterment of everyone in this country.”
Given that they’re putting on a show that had already been the victim of DOGE cuts and that federal arts funding has been under attack, are the artists involved in “A New Era” worried about any blowback?
“I mean, as much risk as there is in doing anything where you are full-throatedly naming what you’re prioritizing,” Williams says, “and that you’re prioritizing a story that centers Black women who are at the helm of trying to steer the course of this nation in a better direction. I don’t know if I care that someone is upset that this history is being brought to the surface and discussed in a way that is highly relevant to what we are encountering now.”
Jean-Baptiste says that efforts to quiet dissent won’t work. “You can’t quiet people down. You’re not going to shut people up,” she says. “We’re going to do it. Don’t tell us we can’t in a world where you’re starting to turn back rights and disenfranchise Black people. Let us get louder.”
ADEkoje points out the irony that the creation of this play was funded by a government that’s now removing what it deems “improper ideology,” including the erasure of Black history, from federal museums, parks and monuments. “NPS’s funding was paramount to this even happening. So I thank NPS for all the work that they’ve been doing to preserve the truth of our country.”
Despite budget cuts at the National Park Service, Gabridge hasn’t given up on producing the third installment of “Suffrage in Black and White,” Ginger Lazarus’s “Nothing But Victory!” Written to be performed at Faneuil Hall, the play unfolds in 1915 just after the failure of an amendment that would have granted women the right to vote in Massachusetts, as the leaders of the suffrage movement debate potential changes in strategy and some troubling compromises.
“There are still staff members [at NPS] who have been deeply involved with this project and really want to see it happen,” Gabridge says. “So I would say it’s not dead. It’s just on pause until the situation changes budgetarily and politically. To activate Faneuil Hall in that way would be stunning.”
A NEW ERA
By Miranda Austen ADEkoje, produced by Company One Theatre. At: The Strand Theatre, July 18-August 2. Tickets: Pay-What-You-Want. $0 minimum.www.companyone.org