The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim (Working Title)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim is the working title for a theatrical epic that follows Jim, a secondary character in Mark Twain’s novel, ’The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and his vantage on their travels down the Mississippi River. Using the frame of a church revival, the play utilizes lost sections from Mark Twain’s original text (cut by the original editors), along with a bevy of other media sources including Shakespeare, Rap / R&B, and other essays and short stories by Clemens. The goal is to re-contextualize the story of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of a Black body, all in order to expose the racism inherent in the original text and “nostalgic Americana” as a whole. Jim’s daughter, Elizabeth, narrates the story, introducing us to a litany of characters from the text such as Huckleberry Finn, Miss Watson, Tom Sawyer and lesser known players like Jim’s wife Sadie (unnamed in the novel) and his son, Johnny. The latter two characters were written almost entirely out of the final version of Twain’s novel, so introducing them to the audience will be an especially fun challenge as they have to be developed largely from scratch.

I call it “A Black American Epic” as the plan is to make it just that, an Epic. What starts as a relatively accurate retelling of the events in Huckleberry Finn soon evolves into a wild theatrical hodgepodge of spectacle, including a minstrel show, a dance with Da Devil, a daring escape down the Mississippi and an appearance from Gawd Theysself. The play is a fierce confrontation of the audience and their nostalgia surrounding Huckleberry Finn and America in general. The story of Huckleberry Finn is a rip-roaring adventure down the Mississippi if you’re in the shoes of Huck, but in the body of an escaped enslaved person desperately attempting to reconnect with his estranged family, it’s a harrowing, life-threatening experience. There’s a sense of immortality to the work of Twain, and this piece hopes to add to that lineage with fun, engaging, nuanced and spectacular theatrical criticism. Important to this goal is the de-centering of the white bodies on stage through clever theatrical means, such as casting Huck Finn as a puppet, using projections for the ghost of the cruel ghost of Pap Finn, and melding the characters of the Duke and the King into one role; two characters simultaneously portrayed by one player as ‘Duke-Dauphin.’