Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted
repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by
Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy
have to say to audiences in the present-day US South? This is exactly the question—with its
entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—that an experimental
production of Cato at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee in 2023 sought to address..
