Family Business: Sarah Bradlee Fulton and Her Brothers Turn the Harbor to Tea

In Broadside, the Bradlee/Fulton family kitchen near Tremont and Hollis becomes the quiet engine of the Boston Tea Party. Late at night, Sarah Bradlee Fulton is already at work, sleeves rolled, testing the water in a basin, laying out rags, a pot of dark “paint,” feathers, and scraps of cloth, because the disguises were her idea. When her brothers and their fellow Sons of Liberty burst in together with word that Adams has given the signal and the crowd is spilling toward Griffin’s Wharf, it’s not a lone heroine they find, it’s the family center of operations. Hats off, coats on the bench, line up. In a few brisk strokes she stripes their faces, jams feathers into caps, throws rough cloaks over their shoulders, and assigns them to Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver before sending the whole Fulton/Bardlee crew back out into the cold.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton "Mother of the Boston Tea Party"

We only see a flash of the ships, a cold blue silhouette of the brothers and their comrades heaving chests overboard, but the heart of the moment is still that candlelit family kitchen and the woman running it. Underneath it all we weave in William Billings’ “Chester,” a tune their Boston neighbors would have known by heart, turning the scene into something like a Fulton family hymn of defiance. Earlier in life, it’s Sarah and her people hauling firewood past British soldiers and refusing to be pushed aside, standing their ground with nothing but their voices and their spine. That lived history is what the actor carries into this scene: every stripe of paint on a brother’s cheek, every feather, every calm order comes from someone whose whole family has already decided they won’t be intimidated. The audience sees one night in a kitchen, but the courage underneath it belongs to a household.