To be free NewGate’s thought-provoking Angels BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	A Little Lower Than the Angels By David Christner. Directed by Brien Lang. With Marc Berry, Bunmi Elemo, Paul Koumrian, Rebecca Custis, Mauro Canepa, Jim Brown, and Pamela Lambert. Presented by NewGate Theatre, at the Cathedral of St. John through October 31.

Numbers and dry historical facts about the Triangle Trade and Rhode Island complicity with the slave industry can lie flat on the page. As the debut production of David Christner’s A Little Lower Than the Angels demonstrates, adding a little blood, sweat, and tears can bring the shameful enterprise vividly to life.

Fortunately, this play builds upon what we already know about the brutal injustices of slavery, so we’re not asked to witness another slave whipping to prod our consciences. We never see the scars we learn are covering the back of the one male slave we see, which corresponds nicely with the central observation of the story — that the slave business could thrive in 1805 Newport as nowhere else in America because all the physical barbarity could take place elsewhere.

Such contrast is established right away, as the opening scene shows a bound Adam Jefferson (Marc Berry) being auctioned off in Charleston, South Carolina, like so much meat. Soon he finds himself given easy work caring for the horses of a kindly Newport gentleman, under the Rhode Island legal pretext that he is an indentured servant rather than a slave. Likewise finessed is the ownership of young Sophia (Bunmi Elemo), also new to Newport. Adam’s affection for her leads him to stifle his hatred of slavery.

Adam is tempted with an offer of his freedom if he cooperates on a slave ship voyage. That comes about because his owner, Thomas Clarke (Paul Koumrian), is a prosperous Newport shipping merchant. Clarke is as secretive as his investors, many from prominent local families, about the real source of profit from his shipping ventures. Only his naïve daughter Constance (Rebecca Custis) believes that his ships bring back from Africa only such things as palm oil and quaint native carvings for collectors. But the rum distilled in Newport purchases a far more valuable commodity in Africa, exchanged in the Caribbean for molasses, which comes back to Newport distilleries to complete the mercantile cycle.

Engaged to Constance is Charles Rutledge (Mauro Canepa), a young man who left South Carolina to study at Harvard to free himself from the shame of the slavery that his wealthy family relied upon. We don’t have a back story, but we can assume that his fiancée’s canny father saw in him a potential for backsliding, especially if Constance could be used as an inducement.

Constance is a pivotal character, since she — like the Abolitionist North in general — had continued to enjoy the benefits of slavery while being, or feigning, obliviousness about complicity. (In a telling incidental detail, we learn that blacks were not welcome at the front door of Newport’s Quaker Meeting House, a center of anti-slavery activity. Moral certitude didn’t preclude racism: even some Quakers, we are told, supported sending slaves back to Africa rather than living with them.) Tugs of affection, back and forth between her and Charles, throw out of kilter the comfortable world views each has been maintaining. In the course of the story, each perturbs the other enough to get them to see reality.

An incidental character is Maria Pires (Pamela Lambert), a black sail maker whom seamstress Sophia begins working for to prove she can become independent. More important to the plot is Charles’s brother John (Jim Brown), a Simon Legree of a plantation owner, a lapse into the stereotyping that the play otherwise tries to avoid. He has no self-doubt or even geniality to soften his brutality, not even bafflement over his brother’s aversion to the slavery that bought him his fine education.

As a convincing narrative, the play does have its flaws and loose ends as well as the above strengths. Some relationships, such as between the brothers, remain melodramatic. And some possibilities for blowing the lid off the plot — as the two slaves want to do with the institution — go unexplored. For example, there is heartrending tension between Adam’s loyalty to Charles and his chance to free some slaves, which is discussed but not shown as the dark night of the soul it would be for such a person.

The title A Little Lower Than the Angels quotes from a Biblical description of us as close to angelic in our prelapsarian nature. It’s good to have a reminder now and then about the extreme ends of the spectrum that both shed light on human potential. Good for Christner for getting each aspect out there.