Celia, a Slave

Winner of 2015 Yale Drama Series playwriting competition—selected by Nicholas Wright, former Associate Director of London’s Royal Court—Barbara Seyda’s stunningly theatricalCelia, a Slave is a vivid tableau of interviews with the dead that interweaves oral histories with official archival records. Powerful, poetic, and stylistically daring, this poignant work of dramatic art gathers together twenty-three diverse characters to recall the events that led to the hanging of nineteen-year-old Celia, an African American slave convicted in a Missouri court of murdering her master, the prosperous landowner Robert Newsom, in 1855. Excavating actual trial transcripts and court records, Seyda bears witness to a dark and obscure chapter in American history, illuminating the brutal realities of female slave life in the pre–Civil War South while exploring such issues as rape, morality, economics, and gender politics that continue to resonate today. 

Barbara Seyda is the author of Nomads of a Desert City and Women in Love. She has taught at Rutgers University, Pratt Institute, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Arizona’s Continuing Education Program, and lives in Tucson, AZ.