This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right.
