Bathsheba Hull and Major Joseph Hawley III came from two very different walks of life —one was a formerly enslaved widow, and the other was a political figure with family ties to theologian Jonathan Edwards. Both of them dealt with life-upending struggles, and both are central figures in a new show of site-specific plays about their lives in Northampton.
Historic Northampton will host “The Hull/Hawley Plays,” a show of two, one-act site-specific plays produced by Plays in Place, at its Shepherd Barn from Thursday, Sept. 17, through Sunday, Oct. 4. Both of the plays — “The Widow’s Land” by Betel Arnold and “Hold These Truths” by Harley Erdman — feature fictionalized retellings of real events in pre-Revolutionary War Northampton. Every performance will feature both plays and will be followed by a discussion.
“Folks should expect to be really surprised by these stories,” said Brianna Sloane, the show’s director. “I think that they’re really moving, gorgeous new plays, which is exciting, but they’re not what you might think if you’re going to see something about the mid-18th century. It’s gonna really surprise people. There will be people who have never heard of these figures before and some who have but haven’t gotten the story straight.”
Bathsheba Hull, the main character of “The Widow’s Land,” was a free Black woman who had to support her children after her first husband, Amos, died. She owned land on what was then an island and is now the parking lot at the Peter Pan bus stop in downtown Northampton.
At the start of “The Widow’s Land,” Hull addresses an unseen neighbor, offering plants from her garden for tea to remedy a cough. She dismisses the neighbor’s concern over rumors — “idle talk” — about her land, saying, “No wagging tongue is going to drive me from it.”
She goes over to collect laundry from Ebenezer Hunt, a church deacon, businessman and selectman in Northampton, who tells her some bad news: the town’s selectmen plan to evict her from her home. It doesn’t matter that her name is on the deed. The property, he says, was never really hers to buy: the man who sold it to her, John McClane, was a squatter. (It also doesn’t help her case, he warns, that townspeople have seen her in the company of Philemon Lee, a free Black man who had been “warned out” of Northampton.)
Hull is taken aback. McClane’s father Cuthburt, she says, gave the land to his son “with no cry from the town.” No matter, Hunt replies: “It is our duty to maintain order.”
“And a widow with four mouths to feed is a threat to that order? What power do I possess to unsettle this town?” she asks. “Or is this something else?”
“She’s a compelling figure to me for many reasons,” said Trenda Loftin, who plays Bathsheba Hull. “As a free Black woman in the 1700s who owned land here in Northampton, who, even in the historical records, did not hold her tongue, did not cower from her own power and her own ‘knowings’ — that, to me, is one of the most compelling components of her. I experience her as someone strong and determined and vulnerable, but also really committed to living — living her life and taking care of her family and herself.”
“She clearly had her own voice; she clearly really held herself and was not changing herself for anyone else,” said Matt Haas, who plays Hunt. “And the fact that there was this woman owning land, this Black woman in that time owning land right downtown in Northampton, and then what the town did to her, too, what that triggered in the town — [it] feels like an important thing for the town to come to terms with and be aware of as part of our history.”
On the first night of rehearsals on Aug. 31, Sloane was helping Loftin and Haas figure out their blocking — how high should this clothesline be? What would it mean if Hunt stayed standing behind his desk to talk to Hull, positioned as if he were a pastor behind a pulpit?
The following night, Plays in Place returned to the Shepherd Barn for the first rehearsal of “Hold These Truths.”
Major Joseph Hawley III, the central figure of “Hold These Truths,” was a lawyer and patriot in Northampton. He was a first cousin of famed Great Awakening preacher Jonathan Edwards, whose fire-and-brimstone preaching inspired Hawley’s father, Joseph Hawley II, to take his own life.
When Maj. Hawley was chosen to represent Massachusetts in the First Continental Congress, he struggled to decide whether or not he should accept the nomination — his mental health issues threw it into jeopardy. In “Hold These Truths,” those struggles take the form of tormenting voices that echo Edwards’ sermons.
The voices call him “vile,” a man with a “silvery lawyerly tongue” and a “gift for devilish rhetoric.” They taunt him: “You who slipped from the rock of righteousness.” “You who hang over the fires of hell.” “Wandering in a desert of sinfulness.” They tell him it would be better if “your tongue was cut from your mouth,” if he “lived in a darkened hollow,” if he was “born, then died in an instant.”
John Adams went in Hawley’s place, later becoming a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the first vice president of the United States, and the country’s second president.
“If you think about history as being impactful, in the sense that people leave a mark or they’re in your textbook, Hawley could have been that,” Sloane said. “But he made a decision that altered that path and he disappeared from history, even though we’re saying his name, like when we’re going to 33 Hawley to see a show or we’re traveling [Hawley Street].”
Even with Hawley’s “disappearance,” it’s easier to find information about him than about Hull, Sloane noted: “He has books, he has records, his papers are at the Forbes Library — he’s here. He’s here; he’s present. His papers were saved. That’s saying a lot. His furniture was saved … so we have all these tangible ideas about him and his life and his world.” Hull, of course, did not get the same courtesy in the historical record, though she is included as part of Historic Northampton’s exhibit “Slavery and Freedom in Northampton, 1654-1783,” in silhouette with her family.
Both “The Widow’s Land” and “Hold These Truths” have a thematic connection, Sloane said, in that they examine the questions, “Who do we remember, and who do we forget, and why, and how they can both rise out of the record as such compelling individual people that walked these same streets that we’re walking now?”
That, she said, is “the gift of site-specific theater.”
Tickets to “The Hull/Hawley Plays” are $25 regular admission (with optional $35 or $50 ticket tiers for those who want to donate more), $15 for youth and students, and $10 for Card to Culture patrons. To purchase tickets or for more information about the historical figures in each show, visit historicnorthampton.org. The plays are recommended for ages 15 and up.
The cast includes Trenda Loftin (Bathsheba Hull), Matt Haas (Ebenezer Hunt), Michael Ofori (Philemon Lee), Elijah Sarrouf (Joe Clarke), Linda Tardif (Mercy Lyman Hawley), and Lindel Hart (Joseph Hawley). The understudies are Scott Braidman (Ebenezer Hunt/Joe Clarke/Joseph Hawley), Imani Bibuld (Bathsheba Hull), Richmond Wills (Philemon Lee), and Myka Plunkett (Mercy Lyman Hawley).
