The Story Again

4 actors - two white, two black. The two white guys are a patter-and-bones style act who've come to the 1st London Ontario fair (which, really, took place in October 1836.) One of them is a hard-nosed feller. The other is more idealistic, learning how to play the banjo, and too young to be played by me.

The younger more idealistic one, who's acquired a banjo but doesn't know how to play it, one wants to go the extra 15 miles to Wilberforce to meet a true blue black man - Austin Steward, who runs the Wilberforce Hotel. He thinks, naively, that he can get some lessons from him.

Austin Steward is in the process of wrapping up his responsibilities and his business in order to return to his former home of Rochester NY. He's had it with Wilberforce (a town which was named, btw, by him.)

He's just sent his wife and 5 children ahead,though he's just received word that his eldest daughter caught a bad cold on the way. (from which, sadly, she won't recover.)

Austin is the farthest thing from a music instructor you could possibly imagine, and he quicky discovers the boys' cork cans (for blacking up.) He's offended, though perhaps a little intrigued by this introduction to big city folk, and asks them if they want to find out what it's like to step into a real black man's shoes.

The play unfolds primarily as the story being told by Austin to the younger, more idealistic type, with the other two playing various quakers, landowners, lt govners, Canada Company Reps, fellow ex-slaves, grifters, etc., who provide the spurs and hurdles of Austin's Wilberforce effort. His primary black nemesis is Israel Lewis, who is trying to enrich himself through colony-fundraising. His primary white nemesis is Thomas Mercer Jones, primary rep of the Canada Co., who is the Patrick Farrell of this story (but does not die.)

N.B. Patrick Farrell is the feller who claimed the land that James Donnelly had cleared. The latter killed the former during a fight at a work bee.