Patriot Acts – A Suffrage Pageant for our Times

Union College Theater and Dance Department presents Patriot Acts a play written and directed by Cheryl Black.

Patriot Acts dramatizes American women’s quest for enfranchisement, a quest that intersects with the larger story of securing America’s long-deferred dream of liberty and justice for all, a complex, sprawling journey beginning in 1776 and continuing into the present day. The play is a text more “wrought” than “written,” inspired by British playwright Elizabeth Robins’ 1906 “dramatic tract” (especially her second act, which depicts a suffrage rally) and assembled from a plethora of historical and dramatic sources, including speeches, letters, sermons, songs, newspaper reports, memoirs, poems, and plays, and featuring a host of historical figures (John and Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Maria Lopez, Alice Paul, Mabel Lee Hua, Mary Church Terrell, Marie Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, and others….). If there is a central protagonist in Patriot Acts, it is the disenfranchised in the U.S. who have never given up on achieving equality and justice, and one of its major aims is to remind those of us who may now exercise these hard-won rights to honor those who won them for us.

The runtime is 90 minutes.

We have a no refund policy, however if you need to switch your tickets to another performace please reach out to the box office.