Now to Ashes is a play focusing on four exceptional abolitionist women: Sarah Grimke (Sally), her sister Angelina Grimke (Nina), Sarah Douglass, and the Grimkes’ niece, Angelina Weld Grimke. It reflects on a divided and fraught time in American history and pulls parallels from the past to the present in order to provide guidance for confronting our current conflicted times. Each woman’s story gives the audience a varying perspective on how to respond to injustice, while introducing the audience to a time period in history - the 1830s - that is not often talked about. We examine what each woman had to risk, sacrifice, and hide in their pursuit of justice, and how they fell short of their ultimate goal: uniting the public behind abolition and achieving the civil rights of black Americans alongside the rights of women.

Our tale is narrated by Angelina Weld Grimke, who was born at the turn of the 20th century and saw the results of the Grimke’s and the Douglass’ work a generation later. She looks back with a critical eye and tells the audience their story while also unveiling her own. Through her original works of poetry and her own diary entries, we piece together, in her own words, her struggle and her activism, and her ultimate choice to shut herself off from the world. As she walks away, she leaves the audience with the haunting question ‘what will you do now?’

The play challenges the audience to question how to individually and collectively fight against systematic racial injustice; how white allies can effectively fight for racial equity; why historically the abolitionists and the feminists separated; and how this separation perpetuated the unequal and flawed systems that we still have in place today. Now to Ashes is a critical analysis of past policies and actions, and a call to action for future activists and co-conspirators.

This play is co-written by Renae Erichsen-Teal and Sarah Pultz, alongside the edits and input of sensitivity reader Renee Harleston. The play’s themes focus strongly on community and equity, and with that in mind, any production of this play must hire local artists, circulate money back to the local community, and work alongside local anti-racist and abolitionist groups fighting for racial justice, as described in the preface of the play.