Stephen Seals stood onstage waiting to be auctioned off. Moments later, a white slave auctioneer pointed a gun at one of the other Black men gathered with Seals, and a Black mother cried for her children.
The scene, titled “What Holds the Future,” was Seals’ first scripted piece at Colonial Williamsburg, an immersive living-history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, where costumed interpreters of history reenact scenes from the colonial past and portray figures from that period. “Every time you did this piece, it hurt,” said Seals, an actor-interpreter and community outreach and program development manager at the site.