Composer’s Note:

A Dangerous Man is a highly dramatic, staged monodrama about John Brown, abolitionist fighter in Kansas and instigator of the watershed events at Harpers Ferry in 1859, said by W.E.B. DuBois to have begun the war to end slavery. The texts include letters by Brown himself, commentary by contemporaries such as Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emerson and Lincoln, along with excerpts from the Kansas Slave Code, and verbatim accounts of his trial. The piece is meant as a cautionary tale with a clear message for us today.