Julia Weber
Staff writer
At 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. today in Bratton Theater, Chautauqua Theater Company’s mainstage production Execution of Justice continues its run of performances.
For Jade King Carroll, CTC producing artistic director, the play speaks to a season centering community in all its forms. While other productions have focused on the coming together of communities, Execution of Justice finds a community that has been torn apart by a tragedy and asks how individuals grapple with hard decisions and complex situations.
“Every play this season, in some way, deals with community,” Carroll said. “… The question I ask when programming or when directing anything artistically is, ‘Why now for me, why now for here and why now in dialogue with the rest of the season?’ I think we look at belonging and community in different ways in each play.”
Like Carroll, playwright and director Emily Mann finds herself asking the same question of “why now” before she writes or directs a piece. Mann is a practitioner of documentary theater, a style of theater depicting nonfiction stories through an assemblage of primary sources rather than through a fictionalized script.
Carroll asked Mann if Chautauqua could stage Execution of Justice during the 2025 season, and when Mann revisited the play — which premiered in 1985 — she understood why Carroll felt it was such a compelling piece to include in the season.
“I read it again and went ‘boom.’ I understood finally what she meant of ‘why this play now,’ ” Mann said. “It really is a portrait of America, and it’s America in its fragmentation and its divisions and the same divisions that divided San Francisco in 1978, ’79 is what we’re dealing with now, except on steroids. It’s the exact same divisions. They have not eased; they have only intensified. Looking at the play in that way was extraordinary.”
Though the play made its premiere 40 years ago, both Carroll and Mann find it as relevant as ever before.
“I think it’s tragic. Looking back at 40 years ago, it’s a warning that we’re now living in, and that was part of the ‘why now,’ ” Carroll said.
Execution of Justice follows the trial of Dan White, the former San Francisco city supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk — the first openly gay elected official in the state of California. Mann said that while the play is about a very specific incident, it has much broader implications that she believes the country still needs to address.
“There’s an inciting incident, certainly, but the bigger questions that they will come out with transcend both the location and the specific incident. It’s a very American incident,” she said.
Mann said the week the cast began rehearsals was the same week in which Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman were fatally shot, and their dog was mortally wounded in their home. To Mann, it’s a calling that now more than ever “we have to look at ourselves.”
“Come on, wake up,” Mann said. “What are we going to do about it? It’s people like Chautauquans who should be at the forefront of that crusade (for change). Not only are they able to, but they have the influence, they have the money and they have the brains — once they accept the truth of this — to do something about it.”
