Writer: Jeffrey Miller
Director: Andrew French
This week sees the third anniversary of the murder of Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery in Satilla Shores, Georgia. The keen runner was jogging in the area on February 23, 2020, when three armed white men in two pickup trucks cornered him and, after a brief struggle, Arbery was fatally shot.
What made the killing so shocking was that it was recorded by one of the participants, Roddie Bryan, on his phone. It was only when that video came to light and went viral, some two months after the murder, that police were finally spurred into charging his killers.
Jeffrey Miller’s verbatim piece takes transcripts of witness statements from police, Arbery’s family members, defence and prosecution attorneys, and the perpetrators themselves. These segments are mixed with video footage – body cam footage from the first responders, and even segments of Bryan’s video.
Miller and Perry Williams flit between various roles, spelling out the events that led up to Arbery’s murder. Former cop Gregory McMichael and his son Travis claim that the neighbourhood was being plagued with burglaries and that their actions fell under Georgia’s Civil War-era “citizen’s arrest” statute – despite having no evidence that Arbery had any involvement. In their trial summation, a defence attorney questions why, if he was running, Arbery was not wearing socks and had not adhered to a footcare regime; his mother’s devastating response, “I’m sure he would have cut his toenails if he knew he was going to be executed,” drips with sarcastic fury.
If Maud were just a retelling of Arbery’s murder, it would be devastating enough. But Miller extends the play to place the killing into a wider context. From opening with a projected replica of Vertis Hayes’ 1930s work The Lynchers, a painting which focuses on the white perpetrators of lynching, it is clear that the McMichaels’ actions have precedent, just one more point on the racist history of the Southern United States.
That continuum is illustrated by a succession of recreations of explorations in media over the years. James Baldwin, one of the finest and most eloquent thinkers America has ever produced, is vividly brought to life by Miller in discussions with talk show host Dick Cavett, and later in an excerpt from his 1965 debate with William F Buckley at Cambridge University.
Williams, meanwhile, delivers a couple of verbatim speeches from then-President Donald Trump, as a scathingly accurate series of verbal tics show him as a tiny mind adrift on a turbulent ocean of word salad. Williams’s Trump is a man who knows where he, as the country’s leader, is supposed to take his oratory, but instead circles a whirlpool of racist talking points.
The combination of reaching back into the past and widening out to a shared present (references to the deaths of George Floyd, Botham Jean and Trey Nichols also feature) is tricky to achieve in the play’s one-hour running time. There are aspects of Arbery’s case which might otherwise have been explored in more detail that go untouched. But Miller’s structural work has a powerful strength to it and is all the better for that.
Roberto Esquenazi Alkabes’ video design, which mixed video excerpts with a silent cartographic representation of how the McMichaels and Bryan snared Arbery in a pincer movement, includes (and ends with) a representation of a long, tree-lined avenue. Road markings on the floor of the stage extend into the far distance; the sort of road along which Arbery loved to run, now forever denied to him.
Continues until 25 February 2023
