With a last-minute decision, purchasing one of the final tickets left in the house, there I was in the audience for James Ijames’s “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.” With “Good Bones” just completing its run at the Arden Theatre, “Miz Martha” finishing at the Wilma Theater, and the world premiere of “Wilderness Generation” at Philadelphia Theatre Company on the horizon, Philly has entered something of a James Ijames season. The beloved playwright, best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham,” has a style that does not care much for polished realism — as he remarked, “Extremes are natural. I find the divine in the extreme.” That sentiment feels exactly right for “Miz Martha,” a play that puts history on trial through spectacle, humor, and distortion.
The story itself is simple. Miz Martha Washington lies on her deathbed after George Washington’s death. Around her stand the enslaved people who care for her, waiting for the moment of her death, on which their freedom depends. But as anyone familiar with Ijames would expect, the play does not stay in its historical frame for long. What starts as a deathbed scene soon breaks into something more absurd, witty, and spectacular — one that blends history, fantasy, satire, game show, auction block, and courtroom. What emerges is more like a fever dream than a linear narrative. The delirious nature of the show sweeps the audience up and denies any stable or immersive way to watch. History is no longer stable, but constantly performed and re-performed.
That same logic shapes some of the play’s strongest scenes. In one scene, Miz Martha (Nancy Boykin) enters a game show that mocks American history with trivia, prizes, and spectacle. In another, she finds herself on the auction block. At that moment, the play takes one of its sharpest turns. With the question from Priscilla (Ciera Gardner), “Do you really want to know what my life looks like?”, Martha is pushed on a circular platform as the auctioneer reaches into the audience and asks people to bid on her. The position reverses. Miz Martha, who once held power through race and class, now has to confront what it means to be Black. The scene asks for participation, and the audience no longer sits at a safe distance. Yet, the crowd was hesitant, unsure, and doubtful. Should we participate? Or should they just sit aside and watch?
By the final section, the play arrives at the trial promised by the title. Witnesses appear one after another, with George Washington (Steven Anthony Wright) among the first. But even here, the production does not shift into realism. Instead, it continues to rely on theatrical images that carry more force than direct representation. One of the most creative moments comes in the reenactment of a scene where Martha’s son is suggested to assault Ann Dandridge (Kimberly S. Fairbanks), the maid. The actor hangs a white cloth across the stage on a diagonal. The action takes place behind it, and the audience sees only a shadow. The scene allows shape, outline, and absence to do the work. In a play full of excess, this moment of partial concealment lands with unusual weight.
The ensemble work also gives the piece much of its texture. Two moments stand out to me in particular. The first comes early on: Martha stands alone, downstage, while the rest of the cast gathers upstage on the opposite diagonal, all eyes on her, all with that falsely polite question, “Is there anything we can do for you?” The satire in that moment lands hard, where care turns into performance and concern turns into mockery. Near the end, the formation returns, but this time the request is direct — “freedom.”
Despite all its merits, the set left me less convinced. A giant bed and a staircase dominate much of the second half of the play, and crew members or actors keep pushing them into new configurations. Though the possible intention might be that the exposed artifice could remind the audience of the play’s meta-theatrical frame, the rearrangements did not seem to gather new meaning as the show went on. Instead of adding to the dream logic or deepening the play’s argument, they often felt arbitrary.
That issue also extends to other design choices. The fireplace in the first act seemed to exist simply as set dressing. It did not return in any meaningful way, nor did it seem to carry symbolic weight. It was just there, as a fireplace. The same problem surfaced in the scene where Martha gets served food. The fireplace was placed against the bed. It was unclear whether or not this shift was meant to signify anything. Perhaps it was, but at the end of the day, it seems to serve only as a set that was used to place the bowl with Martha’s food. The set gave it no larger reason to exist in that specific form.
More broadly, the set looked too realistic for a play that asked so insistently for dream, distortion, and meta-theatricality. I also could not fully make sense of the shift from the small bed in the first half to the giant bed later on. Perhaps the larger bed marks full entry into the dream world, especially since the play returns to the smaller bed at the end, almost as if nothing happened. But that visual logic never fully clicked into place.
Still, even with those frustrations, “Miz Martha” is definitely a treat for people who just want to have a good time on a Saturday night. It is excessive, messy, funny, biting, and at times disorienting. But that excess feels central to Ijames’s theatrical language. He does not ask history to sit still and behave. He pulls it apart, mocks it, puts it on display, and lets it answer for itself. In “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” that method gives us a stage where history does not receive reverence. It receives confrontation.
After the curtain call, the actors asked us to stay: “The funding and the arts that they make for the artists are under threat.” It’s a call to lean on the audience. “No donation is too small; no donation is too large,” said Anthony Martinez-Briggs. “We’re gonna be alright.” If the play asks us to witness, it also asks us to help. Not just with applause, but with position. What does it mean to be part of this moment, not as an observer, but as a participant? If this is history, then we are already inside it.
“The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington” is streaming on the Wilma Theater platform from April 9 to May 3. Presale tickets are now available.
