Uncle Tom's Stowaways: New York's Drama Dept. Interprets an American Classic

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So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" Abraham Lincoln famously commented upon meeting the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. More than a hundred years have passed, but Stowe's magnum opus, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly, still has the power to enflame - though perhaps for dramatically different reasons, as a pugnacious new production from the New York collective the Drama Dept. vividly demonstrates.

Since its publication in 1852, Stowe's impassioned novel about slavery has furnished some of the most popular theatrical material in American history. The adventures of the piously suffering Uncle Tom,'the mischievous and unschooled Topsy and the angelic Little Eva have been played for melodrama, for tragedy, for spectacle, in good taste and bad, and reshaped for every passing vogue. At …