The world premiere of “Becoming Benjamin Lay” will be on April 11 at 4PM with a screening at Carnegie One in Braddock, PA.
He was small in stature, but impossible to ignore.
A man who refused to wear clothes made from exploited labor. Who would interrupt church services, not politely but theatrically, and even sometimes violently, to expose the moral rot beneath polite society. A man who lived in a cave, boycotted goods tied to slavery, and staged shocking public acts meant to jolt his audience into reckoning with their own complicity. He believed the world could be remade, urgently, through confrontation, conviction, and a refusal to accept injustice as inevitable.
But there’s a good chance you don’t know his name.
Despite his radical vision and uncompromising opposition to slavery, decades before the abolitionist movement, the English-born Quaker Benjamin Lay remains largely absent from the historical narratives we inherit.
The question is not only who Lay was, but as historian, writer, and social activist Marcus Rediker puts it, “Why didn’t I know about this guy?”
The new documentary Becoming Benjamin Lay, directed by local filmmaker Tony Buba and co-created with Rediker, seeks to answer that question while also posing another: what kind of resistance is within you, and what will you do with it?
Premiering Saturday, April 11 at the Carnegie Library in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Becoming Benjamin Lay is less a conventional historical documentary than a layered act of recovery. It is, in many ways, part of a broader campaign to return Lay to public consciousness, a figure Rediker has spent decades researching, writing about, and reanimating across various mediums, including the biography The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist and companion graphic novel Prophet Against Slavery.
The film takes the stage production The Return of Benjamin Lay—co-written by Rediker and playwright Naomi Wallace—as its point of departure, with actor Mark Povinelli inhabiting Lay in a way that is immediate and arresting. But it doesn’t remain confined to the stage. The documentary expands outward, weaving together performance, archival research, and present-day inquiry to create a work that operates as an ongoing dialogue across time.
Lay himself was, by any measure, extraordinary: a Quaker, abolitionist, vegetarian, and early advocate for animal rights and economic justice. He moved from England to Barbados, where he witnessed the brutality of slavery firsthand, and later settled in Pennsylvania, where he turned his fierce moral clarity against fellow Quakers who owned enslaved people.
He was, perhaps more than anything, however, an agitator.
“He wanted to provoke, to unsettle, even to confound,” Rediker says. “He asked everyone he met, ‘Which side are you on?”
That question echoes through the film.
Part of the reason Lay has remained obscure is structural. He circumvents narratives that dominate textbooks; those shaped by elites, institutions, and tidy arcs of progress. Instead, he belongs to what Rediker calls “history from below,” a methodology focused on “ordinary working people who are usually left out of the history textbooks.”
To uncover Lay’s life required reading against the grain, examining documents created by those in power and extracting, from their margins and silences, the presence of someone who disrupted them.
The result is a portrait of a deeply complicated, often difficult man. “He was so far from being saintly,” Rediker says. “Many people really despised him… he challenged people all the time.”
That refusal to soften Lay, or to make him palatable or respectable, is central to the film’s power. Rather than offer a hero to admire at a safe historical distance, Becoming Benjamin Lay provides a presence that intrudes on the present.
Lay’s activism was loud. It was theatrical, confrontational, and deliberately unsettling. Rediker traces this to a long tradition of “guerrilla theater,” public acts designed to dramatize radical ideas and force a moral reckoning.
In one infamous incident, Lay stood before a gathering of Quakers and plunged a sword into a Bible filled with red dye, symbolizing the blood of enslaved people. It was shocking. It was offensive. It was impossible to ignore.
“You might hate him, you might love him,” Rediker says, “but you were gonna argue about him.”
That ethos carries into the film itself.
Tony Buba, whose decades-long career has focused on working-class life in Braddock and beyond, approaches Lay as part of an ongoing conversation about power, labor, and resistance. His filmmaking has always balanced political commitment with a kind of wry, humanistic attention to everyday lives, what film programmer Jed Rapfogel called an “incredible combination of very committed, serious political commitment, and this bizarre comic sensibility.”
In Becoming Benjamin Lay, that sensibility finds a new subject, but a familiar haste.
“We made [Becoming Benjamin Lay] for activists,” Rediker says, “for people who wanna see change.”
Buba echoes this, framing the film as a provocation. “Is it just an hour of entertainment?” he asks. “Do you just leave, or do you start questioning? And how does it then… connect with your own life?”
This is where the film’s central question takes shape: What kind of resistance is within you? And more importantly: what will you do with it?
Rediker points to the closing lines of the play, which the film echoes in spirit: “What dost thou say? But better yet, what wilt thou do?”
It is a question that collapses the distance between 18th-century abolitionism and contemporary crises. Climate change. Economic inequality. Systems of exploitation that persist, often invisibly, in the structures of everyday life.
Lay, remarkably, anticipated many of these connections. He understood that consumer choices—what we eat, wear, and buy—are entangled in systems of labor and suffering. He refused sugar because he had seen how it was produced.
Today, those questions remain.
One of the most striking aspects of Lay’s thought is its scope. He did not see abolition as a single-issue cause, but as part of a broader vision encompassing economic justice, gender equality, environmental stewardship, and animal rights.
“He connected the dots so long ago,” Rediker explains.
In this sense, Lay feels relevant and eerily prescient. “He had this unbounded imagination about how we could all live differently,” Rediker says.
That imagination is, perhaps, what the film seeks to recover as much as the man himself. Because if Lay’s ideas were possible then, if such a radical vision could emerge in a world even more entrenched in slavery and inequality, what might be possible now?
Central to the film is Mark Povinelli’s performance, which grounds Lay’s story in lived experience. Like Lay, Povinelli has dwarfism, and Rediker emphasizes how this shared embodiment brings a depth of understanding that transcends historical reconstruction.
“Mark makes it all real,” he says.
The performance resists abstraction. Lay is not an idea, not a symbol, but a body moving through the world, one that is seen, judged, dismissed, and underestimated. That physical presence becomes part of the film’s argument about who gets remembered, and who is erased.
Lay was excluded not only for his radical politics, but for his class, his methods, and, as Rediker notes, “the wrong kind of body.”
To bring him back is to challenge those exclusions.
The question arises repeatedly, both within the film and around it: why Benjamin Lay, and why now?
The answer, while complex, is also urgent.
“We’re damaging the planet so badly,” Rediker says. “That we could live differently… that is a message from Benjamin Lay to the present.”
At the same time, the film resists easy moralizing. Lay himself was contradictory, difficult, even abrasive. He alienated allies as often as he inspired them. He was, in many ways, an uncomfortable figure.
And that is precisely the point. “One of the purposes is to create some discomfort,” Rediker notes.
Because without discomfort, there is no reckoning. And without reckoning, there is no change.
The title of the film—Becoming Benjamin Lay—suggests a process rather than a destination. Engaging with the questions he posed, the contradictions he embodied, and the possibilities he imagined. It is about becoming, in some small way, more attentive, more critical, more willing to act.
For Buba, the process of making the film had that effect. “You start thinking, ‘What would Benjamin Lay do?’” he says.
That question lingers.
It lingers in the theater after the credits roll. It lingers in the everyday decisions that follow. It lingers in the uneasy recognition that knowing something, truly knowing it, demands a response.
That the film premieres in Braddock, at the Carnegie Library, carries clear significance. Buba’s work has long been rooted in this region, chronicling its histories, its struggles, and its people with a specificity that resists generalization.
To bring Lay’s story to Pittsburgh, a town shaped by labor, industry, and their aftermath, connects past and present in an immediate way.
It is to suggest that Lay’s questions are embedded in the places we live, the communities we inhabit, and the systems we navigate every day.
In the end, Becoming Benjamin Lay offers fewer answers than insistent questions.
Why didn’t we know about him?
What does it mean to live ethically in a world structured by injustice?
What are we willing to risk, to change, to give up?
And perhaps most importantly:
What kind of resistance is within you—and what will you do with it?
The film keep those questions open, unresolved, alive.
Which may be the most faithful tribute to Benjamin Lay of all.
