Review: Company One Theatre's A NEW ERA is Fresh Look at Boston History

For the final production of its 27th season, Company One Theatre (C1), in partnership with the City of Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture. is presenting the powerful world premiere of “A New Era,” a drama by Boston playwright Miranda Austen ADEkoje, at Dorchester’s Strand Theatre, through August 8.

Set in Boston in 1895, the two-act play centers on real-life activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (Patrice Jean-Baptiste), who founded the Woman’s Era club and journal and organized the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America out of her Beacon Hill home in Boston. Six other formidable suffragists from across the fractured country joined her to start the new movement and – with freedom tenuous and Black lives in peril – to address their own political differences head on in order to build a unified coalition.

Doing so required collaboration with the National Federation of Afro American Women, which worked on suffrage but also had a broader focus on everything from education and temperance to anti-lynching laws. Addressing these concerns was vital because Black Americans were still mostly restricted from voting – it would take until 1920 for women to win the vote – and attacks on Reconstruction were leading to more frequent lynchings.

Boston is nothing if not a city rich in history. Turn any corner and you’ll probably come face to face with another tale of an historic event that happened right where you’re standing. With this compellingly written work, originally commissioned and developed for the National Park Service by Plays in Place, ADEkoje brings the lesser known tale of Boston’s Black suffragist movement to vivid life – making it accessible to everyone and imbuing it with contemporary relevance.

As Angela T. Tate, Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History in Boston and Nantucket, explains in an article in the program, “Histories of the late nineteenth century often ask readers to choose between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The question itself obscures another archive of Black political thought developing at the same moment. Across the United States, Black women were publishing newspapers, founding organizations, writing books, delivering speeches, and debating the future of Black life in the United States.”

And so, at the show’s recent opening, ADEkoje’s explanation that her decision to write a play featuring an all-Black and all-female cast was a deliberate one was met with enthusiastic applause by the gender- and racially diverse audience of all ages. Indeed, with eight interesting female characters, each with her own story to tell, and eight of Boston’s most gifted women actors to portray them, for “A New Era,” men need not apply.

The Tony Award-winning 2024 musical “Suffs” – which played Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre on North American tour in March – has a similar suffragist focus and is also not unlike “A New Era” in its use of a female and non-binary cast, both black and white. In “Suffs,” while there are male characters, there are no male performers. And although “Suffs” is set in 1913, a generation after “A New Era,” the role of black women, primarily represented by Ida B. Wells, is just one piece of the musical’s story.

Director Summer L. Williams, C1’s co-founder and associate artistic director, makes wonderful use of her gifted cast, several of whom are making auspicious acting debuts with the company in this production. They include Jean-Baptiste, whose wide range – evidenced in “The Hills of California” at The Huntington, “Her Portmanteau” at Central Square Theater, and “Trouble in Mind” at Lyric Stage Boston, to list but a few – has made her one of Boston’s go-to actors. Her steely spined Ruffin – who nevertheless lets down her guard in a tender scene at her grand piano with her young housemaid, Isabel, played by Tolu Asade – adds to her catalogue of memorable roles.

Meaningful performances are the order of the day. Standouts include Sydney Alicia Jackson as Margaret Murray Washington, third wife of Booker T. Washington, who, while used to standing beside her controversial husband, can clearly also stand on her own. In her C1 debut, MaConnia Chesser exerts her familiar gravitational pull as Gertrude Sampson, whose multi-generational knowledge of Boston makes her a commanding, if all too briefly seen, presence in the story.

ADEkoje has written strong, thought-provoking characters, each different and compelling in her own right, and played here not only by Jean-Baptiste, Jackson, Chesser, and Asade but also Aliyah Harris as Florida Ruffin Ridley, Frances Domond as Anna Julia Cooper, Aislinn Brophy as Victoria Earle Matthews, and Regine Vital as Fannie Barrier Williams.

The production’s look and feel are also something to behold – from scenic designer Janie E. Howland’s richly appointed Beacon Hill parlor set to the range of character-specific costumes by Nia Safarr Banks. Also very effective is Christopher Brusberg’s lighting and projection design, with the latter fleshing out the backstory in several pause-to-ponder moments.

And, without hampering the seriousness of the subject matter, sound designer Audrey Dube has woven in brief audio moments from Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything,” and other songs that allow the cast an exuberant pre-show dance, and the audience later, to take a breath and exult in the hope this story carries forward.

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