Charles Johnson’s celebrated National Book Award-winning 1990 novel, “Middle Passage,” reconfigured classic allegorical stories of 19th-century seafaring life, a la Herman Melville, through the complex late-20th-century lenses of race, class and gender. That may sound like heavy going, but Johnson’s book is also a ripping yarn, a thrilling bildungsroman and rich in comic detail, with a thread of supernatural dread woven deep in its fabric. In short: It bursts with theatrical possibilities.
It’s also a lot to unpack onstage. Fortunately, Ilesa Duncan and David Barr III’s well-sculpted adaptation of Johnson’s work for Pegasus Theatre Chicago manages to mostly hit the t…
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