<i>Cato</i> in Tennessee

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—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023?