Recovering Legacy Through Performance: Professor Denise J. Hart Brings Howard-Connected History to Life in Boston

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

Professor Denise J. Hart, Professor of Playwriting and Dramaturgy in the Department of Theatre Arts at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, is bringing a powerful convergence of research, performance, and personal history to the stage this summer in Boston.

Commissioned by the Boston-based Museum of African American History, Hart will present How I Met My Cousin: The Genealogical Saga of the Bailey Family Tree, an original autoethnographic docu-play rooted in years of genealogical research and centered on the life and legacy of her third great cousin, Sue Bailey Thurman.

The work will be presented alongside a public lecture, A Blueprint for Freedom & Justice: The Life and Legacy of Sue Bailey Thurman, during Juneteenth weekend, offering audiences both a historical framework and an immersive artistic experience.

At its core, the project is about recovery—of history, of lineage, and of stories too often pushed to the margins.

This is history being told. It’s not fictionalized. It’s not a fabrication. It is true history… told through a form that brings it into contemporary conversation.

A New Form for Telling Old Truths

Hart describes the piece as a “docu-play,” a hybrid form that blends documentary structure with theatrical storytelling. The performance incorporates film, poetry, sound, and characterization, creating a layered experience that moves fluidly between past and present.

“It’s like this mash-up,” she said. “Documentary-style film segments, poetry, characterization… and all the theatricalization that comes with a performance. There’s also contemporary commentary on history taking place throughout.”

While documentary elements have appeared in past work within the Department of Theatre Arts, Hart’s project represents a more fully realized exploration of the form—one that expands how performance can function within both artistic and scholarly contexts.

It is also deeply personal.

As an autoethnographic work, the piece draws directly from Hart’s own journey tracing her family lineage across multiple states and generations—a process that has taken years of sustained research.

If someone had told me it would take six years, I might not have started. But now that I’ve done it, it is beyond worth it. It is remarkable.

A Howard Story Across Generations

The project carries a profound connection to Howard University.

Sue Bailey Thurman was married to Howard Thurman, the first Dean of Chapel at Howard, and lived on campus for over a decade, contributing to both campus life and broader intellectual and cultural engagement. Her work extended far beyond Howard, spanning education, global travel, activism, and institution-building.

She was a trained musician and educator, a public historian, a collaborator with figures such as Mary McLeod Bethune, and part of a historic 1936 delegation—alongside Howard Thurman—that became the first African Americans to meet with Mahatma Gandhi.

 

The Boston-based Museum of African American History, where Hart’s work will be presented, also reflects this legacy. The institution was founded through the efforts of Black historians and cultural leaders committed to preserving and elevating African American history—work that continues today under the leadership of Dr. Noelle Trent, a Howard alumna.

Together, these connections form what Hart describes as “a significant across-the-ages story,” linking past and present through shared institutional and cultural lineage.

Art as Public Scholarship

For Hart, the project is not simply a performance. It is an act of public scholarship.

Through both the lecture and the docu-play, she seeks to confront the ways in which Black history has been minimized, distorted, or erased, while offering audiences a more expansive and truthful understanding of the past.

I want them to be equally inspired and incensed.

The phrase is deliberate.

The inspiration comes from encountering the depth and breadth of lives like Sue Bailey Thurman’s—lives that demonstrate the wide-ranging impact an artist and intellectual can have on the world.

The incitement comes from recognizing how much of that history has been obscured.

“So much of history in this country that is centered around the enslavement of African American people is beyond paltry,” Hart said. “It’s an embarrassment… and I believe it is by design.”

By presenting this work in a theatrical format, Hart aims to engage audiences in ways that traditional academic approaches often cannot.

“People are coming to be entertained,” she noted. “But so much of it is real… and they’re more apt to pay attention to the history—and not forget it.”

Expanding the Possibilities of Artistic Practice

Beyond the historical and scholarly dimensions, Hart sees the project as a model for students—particularly those whose interests cross disciplinary boundaries.

She is intentional about creating opportunities within the work for emerging artists, including Theatre Arts student Everett Judd, who will serve as director-dramaturg on the project.

“These are the kinds of projects that excite him,” Hart said. “Where there’s this sort of social sciences mash-up with creative humanities.”

She challenges the notion that such students exist on the margins.

“I’m always looking for what we might think of as the outlier student,” she said, before correcting herself. “I don’t think of them as outliers. I think of them as central.”

That perspective reflects a broader vision of what it means to train artists within the College—one that extends beyond traditional pathways and embraces the full range of creative and intellectual possibility.

You don’t have to only do art. Artists can make a more significant, diverse impact and still be artists.

A Blueprint Forward

In both its content and its form, Hart’s work offers a blueprint—one that connects genealogy to history, history to performance, and performance to public understanding.

It is a blueprint not only for storytelling, but for how artists can engage the world around them: as researchers, as interpreters, and as agents of cultural memory.

As audiences gather in Boston this June, they will encounter more than a performance.

They will encounter a living archive—one that asks them not only to witness history, but to reconsider their relationship to it.

And, as Hart hopes, to leave both inspired and incensed.