Monumental Travesties

Abraham Lincoln’s head is missing. Chance, a Black performance artist, has surreptitiously removed it from the Emancipation Memorial—a Capitol Hill statue of Lincoln standing over a formerly enslaved man—and now it’s in his white liberal neighbor Adam’s shrubbery. This act of protest unleashes an absurdist chain of events when Adam knocks on Chance’s door, leading the two men and Chance’s wife, Brenda, down a path that questions how the symbols of our past impact our present. With sharp humor, hijinks, and a palpable love for DC, Helen Hayes Award-winning playwright Psalmayene 24’s searing new comedy explores race, memory, and the often privileged act of forgetting.