Sharia Benn, Marcus McGhee, Melinda Anderson
The first thing Director Sharia Benn noticed when she encountered “Ephraim Slaughter: Freedom’s Witness” was not spectacle, but restraint.
The play opens without fanfare, with warmth, whispers and a man who watches before he speaks. For Benn, Ephraim’s deliberate quietness was not a stylistic choice but a philosophical one. A man who survived enslavement, war and a system built for erasure does not announce himself loudly. He inventories. He hums. He exists in the spaces history never bothered to record.
That attention to what is felt rather than seen became the foundation of Benn’s directorial approach. “Ephraim Slaughter” is a play populated by voices and presences that do not physically appear—overseers, generals, wives, descendants, futures.
Rather than compensating for absence with theatrical excess, Benn leaned into listening as a discipline. Rehearsal became an exercise in observation of set, costume, sound and breath. The actors were asked to generate interior life so dense that absence itself gained weight.
“Typically, we stage what can be seen,” Benn explained. “This play is an architecture of absence.”
That absence carries historical meaning. The enslaved, the foot soldiers, the women in kitchens, these lives were systematically excluded from documentation. The production honors that reality not by making absence spectacular, but by allowing the audience to feel its pressure.
Time also operates differently in this work. Ephraim does not exit the stage as decades pass; instead, time accumulates in his body. Benn directed the play not as chronology but as layering. Each scene deposits memory into Ephraim’s posture, breath and hands. The same chest that once stood tall enough to contradict a general now carries 97 years of remembering. Hands that once loaded rifles now fold napkins with reverence.
Actor Marcus McGhee, who embodies Ephraim, was asked to carry each moment forward rather than reset between scenes. Violence and tenderness coexist in the same body. When Ephraim speaks of love, the memory of mud and marching boots has not vanished—it lives alongside it. Melinda Anderson as Yvonne Pittman/Narrator serves as a living witness, grounding the story in inherited memory while Afrofuturistic Voices arrive from a future already shaped by Ephraim’s resistance. Past, present and future speak together, refusing linear containment.
This approach reframes Ephraim not as a heroic survivor but as a witness. Benn resisted the impulse to mythologize suffering, choosing instead what she calls “radical ordinariness.” Folding a napkin is not elevated into metaphor. It is an act of care, precise and unadorned. Love is conveyed through facts, laughter, flour-dusted hands, a hum. The audience is trusted to recognize beauty without being instructed where to find it.
Silence plays an equally vital role. When Ephraim refuses to name an overseer, the pause is not defiance but mercy. Naming would give oxygen to someone who does not deserve it. Silence becomes an act of protection, a refusal to feed the past its hunger for attention.
The play’s final question is not comforting. Benn hopes audiences leave unsettled, implicated and listening differently. “Who am I invisible to?” “Who am I refusing to see?” Ephraim’s testimony does not offer closure. It interrupts erasure, if only temporarily, and demands that attention continue beyond the theater.
Making the invisible visible, Benn insists, is not about revelation or spectacle. It is about a shift in how and whom we choose to see.
“Ephraim Slaughter: Freedom’s Witness” runs Feb. 14 to 22 at Gamut Theatre, 15 N. 4th St., Harrisburg, presented by Sankofa African American Theatre Company and Gamut Theatre Group, in partnership with the National Civil War Museum. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit www.gamuttheatre.org/sankofa.
UPCOMING EVENTS
At Gamut Theatre
www.gamuttheatre.org
717-238-4111
“Ephraim Slaughter: Freedom’s Witness”
In partnership with Sankofa African American Theatre Company and the National Civil War Museum
Feb. 14 to 22
TMI Improv Comedy Show
Feb. 27 at 7:30 p.m.
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