Pierce Performance Series | Associates of the Boston Public Library

Pierce Performance Series

The Pierce Performance Series seeks to raise the visibility of the Boston Public Library's Special Collections through free public performances. Thanks to the generosity of the Harold Whitworth Pierce Charitable Trust our past performances have commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Peace Jubilee, explored abolitionists' vital messages, celebrated women's suffrage, and examined the life of Thomas Paine. Stay tuned for what's next!

REVISITING the life & influence of one of America's first rebels

The Associates of the Boston Public Library's held its fourth Pierce Performance, To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine, in person and virtually in November 2022. This one-man show, written and performed by Ian Ruskin, featured excerpts of Paine’s incendiary writings that sparked the American and French Revolutions.

Background
Thomas Paine was one of the world’s greatest writers, but worst politicians. With strokes of his pen, Paine inspired the American Revolution, defined the French Revolution, and championed reason as the basis for our beliefs and morality. His ideas about democracy, equality, slavery, pensions, healthcare, education, and morality would have created a very different kind of world if they had been acted on. He also fought passionately against the institution of monarchy. Paine, who ignited revolutions, would die largely ignored and disdained, yet when writing his books and pamphlets he was at the epicenter of world events, literally transforming nations through the power of his words.

Pierce Performance 2022
The Associates of the Boston Public Library is proud to present this free production of To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine. Through his portrayal of this pivotal patriot, Ian Ruskin will provide audiences with an intimate insight into Paine’s life and his important role in bringing about revolutionary changes in the world. The play’s period costuming and props, the soundtrack of original music by Joe Romano, and the sound effects by Keith Robinson will add immediacy and intimacy to Ruskin's powerful performance. The film version of this production, directed by legendary filmmaker Haskell Wexler, aired on PBS for several years.

“It’s performance art... nuanced and layered, enlightening... it’s as if Paine has been brought back to life just to speak to us.”
Showmag, Los Angeles

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Trailer

Ian Ruskin - Writer & Actor

Actor, writer, and independent scholar, Ian Ruskin trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked for 15 years in repertory companies, London’s West End, television and film. Moving to Los Angeles in 1985, Ian guest starred in episodic television such as She Wrote, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and MacGyver. His lifelong interest in social justice led him to found The Harry Bridges Project in 2000, where he produced two radio documentaries and wrote the one-man play From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks: The Life and Time of Harry Bridges about labor leader Harry Bridges. With the assistance of a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship, Ruskin wrote To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine, continuing his mission to present the stories of forgotten and misunderstood heroes from American and European history. Both plays were filmed and directed by Academy Award winner, Haskell Wexler, and aired on PBS for several years. Past performances of the Bridges and Paine plays include the English and Scottish Parliaments in London and Edinburgh, Faneuil Hall in Boston, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre in New York, Grand Performances in Los Angeles, The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and The Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro. Ruskin has also created a radio documentary A Wild Woman Sings the Blues about the life and work of Barbara Dane, and a one-man play about “the man who invented the 20th century,” Nikola Tesla, Magic and Lightning: into the Mind of Nikola Tesla. To learn more, visit Ruskin Productions.

Thomas E. Patterson - Introduction

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School. He will introduce the Pierce Performance on November 2nd and help to connect the play to issues that continue to today.

Patterson has authored three books, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism; How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That's Crippling Our Democracy, and Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?. An earlier book, The Vanishing Voter, examined electoral participation, and his book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He is also the author of Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President (1980), and an introductory American government text We the People, which is now in its 14th edition.. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundations. Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.

John Adam's Copy of Common Sense

Deposited with the Boston Public Library in 1894, the John Adams Library includes over 2,700 volumes collected by the second president during his lifetime (1735-1826) as well as hundreds of additional books later donated by his family members. One of the greatest private collections of its day, the books spans the fields of classics, literature, history, politics, government, philosophy, religion, law, science, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, language and linguistics, economics, and travel. The collection is of particular interest to scholars and historians because Adams recorded thousands of interpretive and critical manuscript annotations in the margins of his books.

One of the gems in this collections is Adams' personal copy of Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The entire book has been digitized and can be read here.

Past Pierce Performances

2021: ONWARD - Votes for Women

Celebrating Women's Right to Vote

Background
The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. The 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, was finally passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920. To mark the recent 100th anniversary of this historic event, the Associates of the Boston Public Library commissioned a play celebrating many of the advocates who brought about this radical change.

Pierce Performance
The 2021 Pierce Performance featured the world premiere of ONWARD – Votes for Women, a documentary play created by Lisa Rafferty, with music arranged and composed by Adam R. McDonald. The production offered the powerful and inspiring voices and perspectives of the extraordinary women who fought for seventy years for equality. Over twenty historical characters from the movement, along with women leaders from our time, were portrayed by an ensemble of ten.

The cast, featured many renowned members of the Boston arts community, playing multiple roles, including: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell, Louisa May Alcott, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Ford, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem. The script was created using language verbatim from documents in the Boston Public Library's Special Collections, and other speeches, letters, articles and interviews from a variety of sources. Suffrage music and songs were interspersed throughout the production, along with an original score.

Playwright, director, producer Lisa Rafferty creates documentary plays which celebrate the strength and resiliency of heroic women and men including SHE DID ALL THAT - Betty Ford: Speaking Out, Saving Lives,about the unforgettable First Lady;THE LEGACY OF WELLES REMY CROWTHER: The Man in the Red Bandanna, about the young man who died saving others on 9/11; and the world premiere of Boston Theater Company’s FINISH LINE, about the 2013 Boston Marathon, with Joey Frangieh. Her comedies –The MOMologues(1, 2and3), published by Samuel French, have appeared in 26 states and six countries. She is the recipient of the Massachusetts General Hospital's the one hundred award for writing a comedy about breast cancer with other survivors, titled Pink Ribbon Overdose. Lisa is the Producing Director of the Elliot Norton Awards and teaches theater at Bridgewater State University. For more details, please see Birch Tree Productions.

Adam McDonald is the composer and music director for ONWARD. His background includes music directing the national tours of Wicked, and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In New York, he music directed Far From Canterbury, and Songs for Slutty Girls. His regional shows include Titanic, Showboat, Footloose, Damn Yankees!, Cats, The Sound of Music, and Beauty and the Beast, all at The Muny, and Guys and Dolls, and The Game at Barrington Stage. Some of Adam’s other favorite projects include Company, Working, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Cabaret, Once on This Island, A New Brain, John and Jen, Curtains, Hello Again, William Finn's Elegies; A Song Cycle, First Lady Suite, and The Rocky Horror Show. Adam performed Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 as a guest soloist at Iowa State University, and Rhapsody in Blue as a guest soloist at The Boston Conservatory. He earned his Bachelor of Music from Iowa State University, and a Master of Music in Piano Performance from The Boston Conservatory.

To see photographs of the 2021 Pierce Performance please visit the related blog post.

2020: Giving Voice to the Abolitionists

Giving Voice to the Abolitionists: Selected Readings from the BPL's Anti-Slavery Collection

Pierce Performance
Do letters written more than 150 years ago in opposition to the institution of slavery in the United States still matter today? Can the words of the abolitionists help us to understand the foundations of social and political movements in our time? Giving Voice to the Abolitionists explores these questions through the performance of a group of young actors as they read the words and letters of abolitionists.

Giving Voice to the Abolitionists features five remarkable students from the Boston Arts Academy, sharing letters originally written by William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Lydia Maria Child, and Amos Augustus Phelps. Wellesley College Assistant Professor Kellie Carter Jackson introduces the readings and argues for the letters critical relevance today. The video was produced in collaboration with Artists for Humanity.

Background
In the late 1890s, the family of William Lloyd Garrison, along with others closely involved in the anti-slavery movement, presented Boston Public Library with a major gathering of correspondence, documents, and other original material relating to the abolitionist cause from 1832 until after the American Civil War.

The Library's Anti-Slavery Collection contains about 40,000 pieces of correspondence, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and realia spanning a 35-year period. The major holdings consist of the papers of William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Weston Chapman and Deborah Weston, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Augustus Phelps, and Samuel May Jr.; records of the American, Massachusetts, New England, and Female Anti-Slavery Societies; and the personal libraries of William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips.

Giving Voice to the Abolitionists premiered on YouTube in December 2020.
To see learn more about our virtual Pierce Performance and see the video presentation please visit the related blog post.

2019: Peace Jubilee

Commemorating the Peace Jubilee

Background
In 1869 Americans from across the country gathered in Copley Square to celebrate the end of the Civil War with a five-day patriotic musical extravaganza. Patrick Gilmore’s National Peace Jubilee featured over 10,000 vocalists, 1,000 musicians and 100 firemen hammering on anvils, performing for an audience of over 30,000 people in a temporary building dubbed the “Temple of Peace.” At the time, it was the biggest musical event ever held in America.

Pierce Performance
To mark the 150th anniversary of this momentous occasion, the Associates of the Boston Public Library held a free event on March 29, 2019 commemorating the Peace Jubilee and telling its story for contemporary Bostonians, just steps from the original location.

The evening featured:

Patriotic brass and choral performances by New England Conservatory (NEC) including My Country Tis of Thee, Lascia ch'io pianga, Hallelujah Chorus and Star Spangled Banner;
Mirroring the original event, NEC musicians were joined by local firemen hammering on anvils for the Anvil Chorus;
Poetry by the City of Boston's Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola;
An explanation of the original Peace Jubilee by Jake Sconyers from the HUB History podcast; and
A keynote address on leadership by Professor Theodore C. Landsmark, Director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

To see photographs and videos of our inaugural Pierce Performance in 2019 please visit the related blog post.

REVISITING the life & influence of one of America's first rebels

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Past Pierce Performances

Celebrating Women's Right to Vote

Giving Voice to the Abolitionists: Selected Readings from the BPL's Anti-Slavery Collection

Commemorating the Peace Jubilee

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