Rutherford’s Travels

For more than ten years, Duncan and Barr have been working with MacArthur Fellow and acclaimed author Charles Johnson to bring his seminal work to the stage. The New York Times calls “Middle Passage” a novel “in the honorable tradition of “Billy Budd” and “Moby-Dick.”” And the Chicago Tribune praises the work declaring, “Long after we’d stopped believing in the great American novel, along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that.” From workshops to staged readings to public discussions and the author’s own input, a world premiere production was created. Combining movement, music and Johnson’s story, Rutherford’s Travels is a tale told through Rutherford Calhoun’s 1830s journal entries. Calhoun, a newly freed Illinois slave and learned scoundrel travels to New Orleans where he escapes his debtors and a forced marriage by stowing away on an outbound rigger named The Republic. But The Republic isn’t just any ship, it is a slave ship and it’s headed to Africa.