Tourists who pause outside Federal Hall, a Wall Street memorial maintained by the U.S. National Park Service, will find its neoclassical facade covered in scaffolding. Its front steps, which host a bronze statue of George Washington, are occluded, too. But until July 22, the man himself can be found inside, fussing over his dentures, his sleep and his coming inauguration.
“Oh, hon,” his wife, Martha, says. “Don’t lead with your anxieties.”
George (Tom Nelis) and Martha (Erin Anderson) are characters in “The Democracy Project,” a collaboration among five playwrights and two directors with a song composed by Michael R. Jackson. Commissioned by Federal Hall, the 45-minute site-specific performance, offered free of charge in the hall’s grand Greek Revival rotunda, is both a pageant-style survey of significant events at the site and an informed critique. Yes, George and Martha are here, but so too are Billy Lee (Nathan Hinton), an enslaved man owned by Washington, and Ona Judge, an enslaved woman owned by his wife, as well as Alexander McGillivray, the Creek chief who signed the Treaty of New York, a short-lived agreement of “peace and friendship,” as its text claims, between the Indigenous people and the fledgling nation.
“We try to get as much information and complexity into it as we can,” one of the contributing playwrights, Lisa D’Amour, said of the show in a recent interview.
The project began when Marie Salerno, the chief executive officer of Federal Hall, and Lynn Goldner, a producer, were strategizing how to raise the memorial’s profile ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Where Federal Hall stands (the original hall was demolished in 1812) was the site of Washington’s inauguration and the first Capitol building. Few besides history buffs — and “Hamilton” viewers — now recall this.
