The Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geo-political competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.
It's hardcore history, the Blitz edition.
These shows that we do are improvised.
There's no script.
I'll usually come in the studio, remember where we were the day before, write down some thoughts that might have occurred to me in just sort of maybe bullet point form or whatever, and then we improvise.
And if we don't like it, we throw it away.
If we do like it, it strings together with the stuff we did previously.
But the reason that matters is I don't have a real roadmap or idea of how what we're about to start here is going to go.
We take this journey together, and then you look at what you have and say, well, what is that?
There's no chance to go over the script later, double check things, decide if this works or that doesn't time it out.
None of that is available to us.
And I think that's partially why it sounds kind of different than a lot of the similar productions.
But this is part of how we've always done it, right?
So I don't know how this is going to go.
The people that have advised me that I've divulged what I'm going to talk about today, the people that I've talked to have told me it is not going to go well.
It doesn't matter what I do.
It's not going to go well.
They said, you should not touch this topic.
It is a no win situation.
Just go do one of the crowd pleaser topics.
There's so many that people will love.