Dinner with Dinah

Event Details

This project is SOLD OUT; you can still join the waitlist (Dinner and performance; performance only).

This is an outdoor event; dress for the weather. Debating your shoe choice? Attendees will walk an unpaved path, on grass, through the garden before taking their seats.

Between the dinner and the performance, guests are invited to tour the gardens and the house.

Project Description

Dinner with Dinah is an immersive dinner and performance created, written, and co-directed by Trapeta B. Mayson, and co-directed by Yolanda Wisher, unfolding on the grounds of Stenton Mansion in Germantown.

The work centers Dinah, an African-descended woman who was enslaved at Stenton in the 18th century. Long known through fragments of archival record and oral tradition, Dinah is reimagined here as a fully dimensional woman—mother, grandmother, laborer, beloved, and ancestor.

The experience unfolds in two acts with a prelude. Act I is a shared, family-style outdoor meal shaped by poetic prompts and guided conversation. Act II transitions into a performance in which multiple performers embody Dinah across interior states and moments through poetry, movement, and music.

This is not a reenactment. It is a reclamation — using food, land, and performance to explore memory, freedom, and care beyond the limits of the archive, on land Dinah would have known intimately.