Actress Denée Benton seems to have a cosmic connection to the 1800s.
She played Natasha Rostova in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” a musical adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” that ran at Boston’s American Repertory Theater before its Broadway debut.
Benton then went on to star as Eliza Schuyler, the wife and confidant of Alexander Hamilton, in the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
Now, she’s moved from sold-out box offices to the Home Box Office in “The Gilded Age,” a period drama set in New York City during the titular era of glitz and glamor in the late 1800s. She plays Peggy Scott, a dedicated writer and journalist that grapples with her place as a Black woman of means in an society rife with decadence, racism and wealth disparity.
“I always call Peggy a bit of a spiritual ancestor of mine because it feels like in the history of our nation, we were born into similar pockets [of time] in a way of being right after major legislative change around the human rights of Black folks in this country and having parents that were raised in a very different system than you were,” Benton told The Culture Show host Jared Bowen on Tuesday.
Benton sees her role as Peggy as crucial to representing the “full dynamic humanity” of the Black experience in the 1800s, not just those of economic struggle.
“The Scott family is loosely based on a [real] pharmacist family,” explained Benton. “Why are these stories so overlooked? Why are they less interesting to financiers, and why can’t we tell this story? What I found is that the feedback has been resounding, it was almost like we’ve quenched the thirst of that missing piece.”
Benton has found her experience learning about the “parallel societies” of upper-class Black people during the Gilded Age to be “humbling.”
“There’s never been a time in this country since we were brought here that we haven’t existed and created huge ecosystems around the whole landscape,” said Benton. “Their balls and their galas … were almost even more protected because they weren’t so integrated. There was a violence that was able to be kept outside of these neighborhoods that were very ‘for us, by us.’ We can very much be self-sufficient in the ways that we can provide for one another.”
