Diamond, one of Boston’s finest playwrights and the author of such plays as “Voyeurs de Venus,’’ “The Bluest Eye,’’ and “Stick Fly’’ - which comes to the Huntington Theatre Company next month - was inspired to write “Harriet Jacobs’’ by Jacobs’s 1861 autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’’
It is fitting that Jacobs’s story should live again at Central Square Theater, since she worked with Boston abolitionists and she moved to Cambridge in 1870, where she ran a boarding house for Harvard students. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The book begins with the heartrending words “I was born a slave.’’ It was a condition that Harriet refused to accept. “The more my mind had become enlightened, the more difficult it was for me to consider myself an article of property,’’ she wrote in “Incidents.’’
However, her master, Dr. James Norcom, did not see it that way. Starting when Harriet was 12, he began to sexually harass her. She resisted him. In “Harriet Jacobs,’’ he has his revenge. When Harriet’s sweetheart, Tom (an appealing Sheldon Best), offers Norcom $700 to buy her freedom, the master (played by Raidge, a hip-hop artist and poet) burns the money, then tells Tom: “I’ll sell her to you for $850, and not a penny less - on the day hell freezes over.’’
By the time she is 16, Harriet feels increasingly trapped by Norcom’s predations and the escalating hostility of Norcom’s wife (Kortney Adams). A white neighbor named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer (De’Lon Grant) begins to woo her. She sees a chance for protection from Norcom. In one of the play’s most wrenching scenes, Harriet pleads for understanding from the audience, explaining that some choices are not choices at all.
