: Thomas Richards
: The Grace Abounding
: BookBaby
: 9798350993400
: The Grace Abounding
: 1
: CHF 3.10
:
: Dramatik
: English
: 124
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Imagine, sir, being born into a world in which nearly every thing you see around you is morally wanting.' It is 1722. David Wellbery, a Puritan ship captain who works for the Royal African Company, has just been told he must take command of a slave ship, the Avery. He takes the commission, but his conscience weighs on him, and he frees the Africans on board in a mutiny against the Company. Then, with ship and crew, he roams the Atlantic coast, freeing slaves in transit from Africa to Colonial America. He renames the ship 'The Grace Abounding,' after John Bunyan's spiritual classic. So the pirates in this play are actually liberators. The British and the Spanish join in league to hunt him down as he makes his way north along the Atlantic coast. Working with a ship redesigned by his master engineer, Augustine Kincaid, a slave whose former master had trained him in architecture and engineering, they evade capture and free many enslaved Africans by using his own intelligence to overcome the odds. The play has another point of location in American history. David Wellbery is in love with the daughter of Cotton Mather, the judge of the famous witch trials of 1692. In the last act, The Grace Abounding makes its way to Boston, where Wellbery and his crew are put on trial. The judge is Cotton Mather himself, who now, in old age, is haunted by what he has done. Wellbery and Kincaid and his crew plead their case, and Mather delivers a final judgment.

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard. He has written four novels, The End of the Line, Pretty Peggy-O, Mrs. Sinden, and Zero Tolerance, as well as a long poem, Antigone at Antietam.
ACT I
SCENE I —The Gulf of Somalia. The U.S.S. Hawthorne and a Merchant Marine ship.
A caption says, ‘The Gulf of Somalia. May 202-.’ We see the console on the bridge of an American Destroyer, the U.S.S. Hawthorne, gaining on a stalled Merchant Marine ship, represented in facade across the stage. The merchant ship flies a Dutch flag. American sailors and officers at the helm of a light Destroyer of the Farragut class. The console faces upstage.
LT. SHIELDS That’s it, sir. Dead in the water.
CAPT. BARNES Odd. No sign of it having been taken. It’s just— there.A beat. Ready your boarding party, Lieutenant.
Two boarding parties of Navy Seals coming in through the aisle entrances. The open stage here represents the sea. At the back of the stage is the structural skeleton of a Merchant Marine ship, showing, in abstract form, its hull, deck, and bridge.
The boarding parties approaching the boat. Ropes going over the sides. Seals shimmying up and fanning out across all decks. Then: Seals going down the outer deck, looking for pirates or crew, kicking open doors.
FIRST SEAL All clear.
SECOND SEAL All clear.
THIRD SEAL All clear.
And so on down the deck. The last door is locked. They force it open. The Seals rush in. A small crew of about five huddled in the corner.
FIRST SEAL This all of you?
MERCHANT MARINE CAPT. Yes.
FIRST SEAL They—where are they?
MERCHANT MARINE CAPT. I—I don’t know.
Seals rushing up the stairs to the bridge, a balcony above the deck disclosed now by lighting, kicking open the door, covering each other, entering firing. After a beat, six distinct shots heard, each in pairs of two. After another beat, a Seal emerges with something long and thin rolled in a white cloth. He unrolls it. We see two very old knives.
SEAL ON BRIDGE This—was all they had.
LT. SHIELDS Two knives?
FIRST SEALOn radio from below decks. Lower decks secured. All hands accounted for. Ahissing beat. Permission to stand down.
LT. SHIELDS Permission granted.
They signal to the destroyer counsel. The Captain crosses the stage, as though in a launch. From the deck above a metal staircase drops down, and the Captain jumps aboard and bounds upwards to the main deck. He is met at the side of the ship by the Lieutenant.
LT. SHIELDS Sir. There were only three of them, sir.
CAPT. BARNES Three? You’ve got to be kidding.Considers the vastness of the large freighter. Three men took—this whole ship?
LT. SHIELDS They didn’t even appear to be armed, sir.Unwraps a rag holding two unused, very old knives. I mean, except for these knives—
CAPT. BARNES You’re saying three men—with just these knives— took this ship?