Marcus McGhee & Weimy Montero Candelario

A cemetery, shabby and dishonored. Whiskey bottles and beer cans litter the ground. Weeds clog the perimeter. But along the fence, gravestones proudly marked CHESTER and POPEL stand guard, seeming to promise the dead that they will, someday, get the respect they deserve.

With “Voices of the Eighth, Part III: Hallowed Ground,” Sankofa African American Theatre Company and partner Gamut Theatre Group continue a saga that began in 2019. The “Voices of the Eighth” project is rooted in the history of Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward, demolished in the 1910s to make way for an expanded Pennsylvania Capitol Complex.

The “Voices of the Eighth” saga represents the contribution of its author, Sankofa founding executive director Sharia Benn, toward restoring the Old Eighth’s reputation from Sin City into a more nuanced and historically respectful picture of a diverse community where businesses thrived, Underground Railroad conductors provided shelter, poets waxed poetic, and suffragettes agitated for the women’s vote.

The original entry, “Echoes of the Old Eighth Ward,” encountered the Eighth Ward through the eyes of Kay, a 2010s teenager struggling to find herself. She finds it through the rich tapestry of stories lingering from a community displaced in the name of progress.

As Hope Mackenzie noted in a preview of Part III, “Voices of the Eighth” then evolved “into a movement as the community requested more.” Benn, the author and director of each iteration, frames her trilogy in the Harrisburg community’s “yearning to learn how to know and love each other.”

The title of “Part III: Hallowed Ground,” contradicts the consecrated “hallowed ground” of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with the nation’s desecrated, once-forgotten African American cemeteries. This time, Kay (Weimy Montero Candelario) returns. The flush of enthusiasm from her initial encounter with the African Americans of the Old Eighth has faded, eroded by her daily struggles as a college student with writer’s block and an offstage mother yelling at her to clean her room.

Kay’s coursework takes her to Harrisburg’s Lincoln Cemetery, where the ground beneath her feet resonates with the stories of its inhabitants – but she can’t hear them anymore. The person listening is Kayah (Marcus McGhee), the cemetery caretaker communing with The Ancestors who walk among the graves.

“Voices of the Eighth, Part III” draws inspiration from the work of Rachel Williams and SOAL, the volunteer-driven Saving Our Ancestors Legacy project restoring Harrisburg’s oldest Black cemetery. Written for middle and high school students but rich with humor and resonance for grown-up audiences, the play explores the historic displacement of African Americans who moved north and west for freedom and opportunity but disconnected from family and friends along the way.

Kayah is living his own personal displacement, so detached from his family roots that he has stopped looking and seeks solace among the graves. As he explains to Kay, Black cemeteries, neglected in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, foster reconnection, housing the records of births, deaths, occupations, and military service that weren’t recorded otherwise.

Benn directs her play with a finely tuned eye for the telling detail – the grimace on Kay’s face at the sight of the desecrated cemetery, a pantomimed tip of the hat, a sleeping bag draped across Kayah’s shoulders like a royal cape, Kay’s tiny shudder of recognition when The Ancestors first break through her sarcastic shell.

Together, Kay and Kayah find shared revelations through their interwoven stories. The characters develop through poetry, seamlessly woven into the scenes as monologues revealing their fears and hopes. Kay’s “Strongest Thing You Can Do” – written by Lunden McClain, portrayer of Kay in the original “Echoes of the Old Eighth Ward” — circles from beginning to end, as Candelario deftly takes Kay from not-ready-for-adulting college student to young woman verging on self-discovery. As Kayah, McGhee passionately advocates for The Ancestors and the power of connecting with their stories.

“We can’t have a future without a past,” he says.

Water flows through the play like, well, water. Summoning the ancestors. Ritual washing of feet. Wiping the grime off an unearthed tombstone. In a talkback after a recent performance, Benn explained.

“It’s liberating,” she said. “It’s cleansing. It’s the way by which many of our ancestors got their freedom. It’s the way many immigrants have come to this country.”

The two living characters get subtle help on their journeys from The Ancestors–real-life Eighth Ward residents Harriet McClintock Marshall (Paula J. Lewis-Roman), who supported freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad with clothing, food, and health care, and Jane Chester (Leah Payne), abolitionist who escaped enslavement, Harrisburg caterer, and mother of pathbreaking Black journalist and soldier T. Morris Chester. Lewis-Roman and Payne interact gracefully, serving as a taciturn Greek chorus that chastises, supports, and — often — acts as an unseen guide directing Kay and Kayah to uncover the stories buried under the weeds and hidden on the gravestones.

Voices of the Eighth Part III: Hallowed Ground,” presented by Sankofa African American Theatre Company and Gamut Theatre Group, runs through March 2 at Gamut Theatre Group, 15 N. 4th St., Harrisburg. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.sankofatheatrehbg.com or www.gamuttheatre.org/vote or call 717-238-4111.

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