Writer and actor Kate Taney Billingsley has been thinking a lot about America’s racial history and her family’s part in it. Billingsley’s great-great-great-great uncle was Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who ruled that African Americans could not be citizens as part of the infamous Dred Scott decision. Billingsley decided to confront that legacy the only way she knew how, by turning it into theater. What emerged is the play “American Rot,” centered on the modern-day fictional meeting of descendants on both sides of the Dred Scott decision. It makes its world premiere this month off-Broadway at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre.



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