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| Sam Adams addressing colonists at the Old South Meeting House |
The scene begins with Samuel Adams confronting the core issue dividing Boston: Parliament’s insistence on taxing tea without giving the colonies a voice. Sam Adams and John Hancock voicing the fears and frustrations that were echoing across Boston that night. The simplicity of the staging keeps the focus exactly where history placed it: on the impossible bind the colonists had been forced into.
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| Sarah Bradlee Fulton disguising the Sons of Liberty as native americans |
Enter Francis Rotch, exhausted from a desperate ride to Milton. Rotch was the unlucky owner of the Dartmouth, the first tea ship to arrive in Boston Harbor. Broadside stays true to that moment: Rotch returns to the meeting house shaken, reporting that Governor Hutchinson has again refused permission for the ships to leave the harbor with the tea still aboard. With that decision, every legal avenue of protest disappears.
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| Son's of Liberty march to boats in Boston Harbour |
What makes the scene powerful onstage is the quiet that follows. Adams delivers the line that still echoes through history, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country” and the small cast shifts, almost imperceptibly, into the role of a city ready to take action. They slip out into the night one by one, hinting at what Boston knows but cannot yet say aloud.
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| Son's of Liberty throw crates of tea into the harbour |
By dressing as Native Americans, the participants rejected their British identity and signaled their new allegiance to America, a moral critique of British decadence and consumerism with simple costumes like blankets and war paint, they intended to present a menacing image to the British. In Broadside, this moment is the hinge between protest and revolution. It’s the instant Boston stops asking permission and starts making history. It’s small, tense, human and it sets the fuse for everything that follows.
