The Plymouth Meeting Quakers are bringing a one-man play about 18th-century abolitionist Benjamin Lay to Villanova on Saturday, Oct. 17.
Actor Mark Povinelli will perform a condensed reading of "The Return of Benjamin Lay" from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Radnor Friends Meetinghouse, 610 Conestoga Road. A discussion and reception with Povinelli and historian Marcus Rediker will follow, according to the Plymouth Meeting Quakers. No admission price or RSVP requirement is listed on the event page.
Lay settled in Abington with his wife, Sarah Smith Lay, giving the story deep roots in the region.
Rediker, a distinguished professor of Atlantic history at the University of Pittsburgh, co-wrote the play with playwright Naomi Wallace. He also wrote the 2017 biography "The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist."
"He's making the demand that slavery has to be abolished … now. Not gradually, but right now, and he's one of the main reasons why Quakers eventually turned against slavery," Rediker told the University of Pittsburgh's University Times in June 2023, when the play debuted in London.
Born in England in 1682, Lay was roughly four feet tall and called himself "Little Benjamin." He and Sarah ran a small Abington farm producing fruit, flax and wool. He refused to consume any product made from slave or animal labor and lived as a vegetarian.
His 1737 book, "All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates," was one of the first abolitionist works published in the Thirteen Colonies. He frequently disrupted Quaker meetings with demonstrations against slavery at a time when many American Quakers owned enslaved people.
Four Quaker meetings disowned him during his lifetime.
By 2018, all four had formally reversed those decisions. That same year, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected a historical marker in Abington, and Abington Friends Meeting unveiled a grave marker for Benjamin and Sarah Lay.
Povinelli, an Obie Award-winning actor, was elected president of the Little People of America in June 2017. The play's production won Best Production at the Standing Ovation Award from London Pub Theatres and earned a nomination for Solo Performance at the OffWestEnd Awards.
The Villanova reading is the final stop in a three-date Pennsylvania series organized across Quaker meetinghouses.
Upcoming readings of "The Return of Benjamin Lay":
- Thursday, Oct. 15, 7 p.m. — Middletown Friends Meetinghouse, Langhorne
- Friday, Oct. 16, 2 p.m. — Quaker Village, Newtown
- Saturday, Oct. 17, 2:30 p.m. — Radnor Friends Meetinghouse, 610 Conestoga Road, Villanova (hosted by Plymouth Meeting Quakers)
