Media Archive

Julia Schachnik, A.R.T.’s Community Organizing Manager, explains how the nontraditional casting of women and women of color as the “Founding Fathers” impacts the storytelling.

Theater is inherently an art form about freedom. Its mission has always been to challenge us to reflect in novel ways on the state of the world — as a vehicle not just for the loudest voices, but also for society’s most contrarian, oppressed, marginalized…It is opening floodgates of opportunity, seeking to fill our imaginative reservoirs with the creativity of — as Adams declares — all Americans.

The cast is made up of immigrants, Native Americans, ancestors of the enslaved and oppressed, queer and trans bodies. They make the audience reckon with the question: Independence for whom? And what kind of nation would this be if they had been considered in the first place?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (associate justice-designate of the U.S. Supreme Court) attended the May 26 opening performance of 1776. A photo of Judge Jackson at her Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings provided inspiration for one of the new production’s opening tableaus, and her presence was particularly meaningful.