‘The Democracy Project’ Brings Drama to Federal Hall

Tourists who pause outside Federal Hall, a Wall Street memorial maintained by the U.S. National Park Service, will find its neoclassical facade covered in scaffolding. Its front steps, which host a bronze statue of George Washington, are occluded, too. But until July 22, the man himself can be found inside, fussing over his dentures, his sleep and his coming inauguration.

“Oh, hon,” his wife, Martha, says. “Don’t lead with your anxieties.”

George (Tom Nelis) and Martha (Erin Anderson) are characters in “The Democracy Project,” a collaboration among five playwrights and two directors with a song composed by Michael R. Jackson. Commissioned by Federal Hall, the 45-minute site-specific performance, offered free of charge in the hall’s grand Greek Revival rotunda, is both a pageant-style survey of significant events at the site and an informed critique. Yes, George and Martha are here, but so too are Billy Lee (Nathan Hinton), an enslaved man owned by Washington, and Ona Judge, an enslaved woman owned by his wife, as well as Alexander McGillivray, the Creek chief who signed the Treaty of New York, a short-lived agreement of “peace and friendship,” as its text claims, between the Indigenous people and the fledgling nation.

“We try to get as much information and complexity into it as we can,” one of the contributing playwrights, Lisa D’Amour, said of the show in a recent interview.

The project began when Marie Salerno, the chief executive officer of Federal Hall, and Lynn Goldner, a producer, were strategizing how to raise the memorial’s profile ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Where Federal Hall stands (the original hall was demolished in 1812) was the site of Washington’s inauguration and the first Capitol building. Few besides history buffs — and “Hamilton” viewers — now recall this.

“We needed to tell this story,” Salerno said.

In 2017, she and Goldner reached out to the playwright Bruce Norris. He suggested bringing in other writers, and Tanya Barfield, D’Amour, Larissa FastHorse and Melissa James Gibson all joined Norris, each of them intrigued by the idea of a site-specific installation inside a national memorial.

“I’d never been asked to write a play for a building,” said D’Amour, a veteran of site-specific work.

Norris, Barfield, FastHorse and Gibson picked seminal events to focus on that happened at the site — the inauguration, the treaty, the presentation of slave trade petitions that the founding fathers chose to ignore, the adoption of the Bill of Rights. D’Amour was charged with tying it all together. Over years of workshops and meetings, the writers debated how best to describe these events, many of which seemed, to contemporary eyes, flawed or insufficient.

“The performance is meant to shake up the reverential quality of the site, to put forward the unreconciled questions that are pervasive in our idea of who we are as a democracy and to say that our founding wasn’t pristine,” said Tamilla Woodard, a co-director with Tai Thompson.

The show was originally scheduled for summer 2020, but the pandemic interfered. The events of subsequent months — the pandemic itself, the racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — only made these unreconciled questions seem more urgent. Workshops and meetings went on. A promenade approach, in which audiences would travel throughout the building, was forwarded, then scrapped. Scenes were condensed in favor of a 45-minute running time, so as not to exhaust tourists and school groups who would visit the memorial’s other exhibits. The resulting performance is, like America, a record of compromises. And until very recently, its conclusion was still undetermined.

“It’s really difficult to reconcile everybody’s experience — not just the characters’ experiences, but also the writers’ experiences and to say something that each person feels OK with,” Woodard said. She estimated that a scene toward the end had been written and rewritten nearly 50 times.

Eventually Jackson was brought on to compose a song, “Democracy Is Messy,” as a way to close the piece. It includes the lyrics, “Democracy is messy/And everybody’s dream is not the same/So we push up the hill/And we do our best to play an unfair game.”

If this acknowledgment of mess does not entirely flatter the events at Federal Hall, the commissioners still sound pleased with it.

“We don’t really know any other national memorial that has developed an original play by important artists to address its own history,” Goldner said.

In the years they spent working on the piece, the writers, who all contributed to one another’s scenes, argued and bargained and conceded and learned to live with what they’d made. This, too, was a democratic project. Participating in it has made many of its creators think more rigorously about America’s project, too.

Gibson, a Canadian American with dual citizenship, wrote George Washington’s opening scene. She had come into the process more forgiving of the founding fathers. But she learned much making the show, and feels less forgiving now.

“I’m a skeptical patriot,” she said. “I love this country. But wow, we have so much work to do. We are so deeply in progress.”