Mauzy | Director

Off the Lane NYC

World Premiere Folk Musical

“In June of 1920, a mob of thousands gathered in Duluth, Minnesota, and lynched three young Black men — Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. They were innocent. No one was convicted of their murders. For decades, their names were nearly forgotten.

This is not a distant history. It is a history that was buried, and burying is a choice.Derek Davidson’s “Mauzy” asks us to sit with that choice. The play borrows its architecture from a 14th-century Japanese Noh drama, its music from the Appalachian mountains, and its moral weight from a real street corner in a real American city. What it builds from those materials is something I don’t think theatre does often enough: it insists that the unspeakable be spoken, that the buried be named, that the people we have chosen to forget be given back their full weight.We are living in a current moment that keeps asking us the same question this play asks. I’ll let the play ask it in its own way. But I will say this: I don’t think any of us will leave unchanged. Elias Clayton. Elmer Jackson. Isaac McGhie.” – Rachel Sabo-Hedges (Director)