Judge Peyton is dead and his plantation Terrebonne is in financial ruins. Peyton’s handsome nephew George arrives as heir apparent and quickly falls in love with Zoe, a beautiful octoroon. But the evil overseer M’Closky has other plans—for both Terrebonne and Zoe. In 1859, a famous Irishman wrote this play about slavery in America. Now an American tries to write his own.

Every estranged member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling Arkansas homestead to settle the accounts of the newly-dead patriarch. As his three adult children sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt, and a contentious family history. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father's possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling surprises and confrontations.

This modern riff on the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from amongst the cast by lottery at each performance) as they journey through life’s greatest mystery—the meaning of living.

Louisa Picquet, child of a slave mother and her white master, was born in Columbia, S.C., but was soon sold with her mother because she looked too much like her master's other child. Around age thirteen, her mother was sold to Mr. Horton, in Texas, and Louisa was sold to Mr. Williams in New Orleans. Louisa lived with him until his death and bore four of his seven children. After his death, she was set free and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. The rest of the narrative describes her successful efforts to raise funds to free her mother. As she was only 1/8 African American, much of the narrative is concerned with Louisa's whiteness and that of her mother and other light-skinned slaves and the sexual exploitation they experienced at the hands of white men. Hiram Mattison met and interviewed Louisa Picquet in Buffalo, New York, in May 1860 and published this narrative, much of it written in interview style to preserve Picquet's own words. He included his own "Conclusion and Moral," emphasizing the many instances of slave women bearing their masters' children, and concludes the work with somber details of slaves being burned alive as punishment.

THE STORY: This funny, trenchant, and powerful play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever.

LOUISA PICQUET, the subject of the following narrative, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and is apparently about thirty-three years of age. She is a little above the medium height, easy and graceful in her manners, of fair complexion and rosy cheeks, with dark eyes, a flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl, and every appearance, at first view, of an accomplished white lady.