Every student of American history has heard of Henry “Box” Brown. But what distinguished him is often reduced to a headline: The Man Who Mailed Himself to Freedom. Enslaved in Virginia, the 5-foot-10-inch Brown crammed himself into a small wooden box and was sent with the help of friends to the address of an abolitionist organization in Philadelphia. He spent 27 hours en route.
That remarkable, Houdini-like feat became the central metaphor of Brown’s life: He was an escape artist forever searching for true liberation. Working as a magician and abolitionist lecturer, he was forced to flee his circumstances again, this time to England when his freedom was threatened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
His story has been the subject of numerous books, plays and films, including a hip-hop musical and a drama set at a Brown magic show, written by Angels in America writer Tony Kushner. One of the latest is Box, by Austin-born playwright Jarrett King, making its Dallas premiere at Undermain Theatre.
Like most people, he had known Brown only as the Man Who Mailed Himself to Freedom.
“Learning that he was one of the earliest stage magicians in the United States was totally new to me,” King said in a phone interview from Chicago, where he moved eight years ago to further his acting and playwriting career. “Then what really hooked me was learning about his first wife, Nancy, who was a slave. That’s where the play began: my interest in digging deeper into Nancy and how she could have figured into the rest of his life if she had not been wiped from the history books.”
In reality, Brown never saw his wife again. His slave master sold Nancy and their three children, breaking a promise to him. That betrayal prompted Brown’s decision to make his first unconventional exit from enslavement. Box, which premiered in 2023, includes both magic tricks that he was known to perform and historical speculation about his personal life.
It was King’s second commission from Austin’s Penfold Theatre Company, where he was associate artistic director. That same year, King received a $10,000 grant from Undermain’s Katherine Owens Fund for New Work, named after its late co-founder.
I talked to him about his career and the creation of Box. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So much has been written about Brown. Why did you want to have your say?
He eluded capture for so long. But I think he also eludes our understanding of Black history. I certainly join the pantheon of people trying to pin him down. But my strategy was to not pin him down but allow the full breadth of his character and his complexity, his good deeds and his bad, to sit there on the surface. At no point was I interested in a traditional biopic treatment: He was born this year and died that year. Here’s everything that happened in his life between those two dates.”
I wanted to tell a deeper story about heroes, Black heroes in particular, given that our heroes are often painted with the sheen of perfection — they are without fault, the work that they did came easily to them. The play digs into the difficulties around achieving a measure of freedom as a Black man back then. But as a Black man in 2025, I relate very much to the story that freedom is elusive, and Henry had to be as elusive as the freedom he was constantly chasing.
What did you wind up focusing on? What had not been done before?
It was Nancy. When I was doing my research, she was the person I kept getting caught on, like a sweater on a nail. I could not escape the fact that this woman existed and that she never got a chance to have her story told. It felt like I couldn’t really accurately tell the full story of Henry without also having that part of him included. My strategy was to fabricate a possibility that wasn’t previously there in the historical record.
What it would be like if she did find him after he moved to the United Kingdom, after he had one of the earliest interracial marriages in the U.K., married a white woman and achieved this fame. What would it be like if he had to grapple with his choice? The choice represents two loves and two halves of his heart, but it also represents the life that he hopes to build for himself, that he was getting ever so steadily closer to achieving, and the life that he escaped, a life that feels achingly familiar to him even as he tries to overcome his misfortunes and the hold of slavery.
What role does magic play in Box?
I wanted the structure of the play to resemble the structure of a magic trick. That idea of presenting an ordinary object or situation, then you make that object do something extraordinary, like disappear. But it’s not enough to just make the rabbit disappear out of the hat — you have to bring the rabbit back for it to be considered true magic.
We begin the play in one reality. Henry is faced with a harrowing moment that feels like all the things that he has built could be taken away from him. Then it takes off in a variety of directions and weaves in and out of history. By the end, we have been given a lot of paint to color with and have to make a decision. What has returned? Do we come back to the present or have we entered some new reality?
Considering an earlier play of yours is an Afro-futurist rewrite of The War of the Worlds, historical speculation sounds right up your alley.
It’s exciting for me to tinker with history. What would it mean if Orson Welles was a Black man and those actors who pulled off that fateful night of misdirection and misinformation. What if they were all Black? Imagining what sort of future that would have created felt like it set off my work on the trajectory of analyzing what it means to be a hero.
Who’s the hero of Frog Splash, your play now in development?
It’s about two professional wrestling fans. The hero is this wrestler who they idolized and was featured on a VHS cassette tape they own. It captured this extremely rare, almost supernatural moment in which he performed a big jump off the top rope onto a guy who’s lying on the middle of the canvas. It’s been performed by many wrestlers many times, but they were able to capture a moment when he achieved a hang time that was unbelievable.
What is their responsibility to preserve his memory when someone makes a very big cash offer to buy the footage and how is their friendship tied up in this hero of theirs? Ultimately, that device acts as a container for a story about male friendships, and the things that we often find difficult to say to each other to express love, to express when a relationship between two friends is veering off course.
Why is Henry Brown still important?
He represents what it means to try to find your own measure of freedom, in particular as a Black human being. This play was scary for me to write because I knew I was going to have to examine my own relationship to slavery. I have become a transplant from Texas to Chicago, from a red state to a blue state, so I could relate to this idea of wanting something bigger and more fulfilling in your life, especially today as we are seeing some fairly unprecedented changes to the very fabric of our country.
It’s ultimately a love story, in some ways the love story between Henry and himself, who he feels he can still be, even as freedom remains elusive.
Details
Feb. 27-March 23 at 3200 Main St., Dallas. $12.50-$38.50. undermain.org.
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