The Script

Mary’s repertoire included extracts from Shakespeare’s Othello, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Christian Slave (an adaptation for the stage of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s bestselling epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, which had been published in 1855. Longfellow was a committed abolitionist and, like Stowe, an admirer of Mary’s performances. 

Let Her Witness It is composed of extracts from these texts. Othello, The Christian Slave, and Hiawatha have always provoked questions from their readers and audiences: their authors intended them to. But other, sometimes more urgent, questions which could not have been foreseen by Shakespeare, Stowe, and Longfellow will be immediately obvious to audiences today. These questions are at the heart of this film.