A public Staged Reading of The Excommunication of Mrs. Eaton, by Allan Appel, who is also a reporter with The New Haven Independent, will be presented in cooperation with NHTC and Bregamos Community Theatre. This reading is free (donations will be accepted at the door).

The Excommunication of Mrs. Eaton is based on historical events that happen in the early years of the New Haven Colony. It is a six-person trial play and a theological love story in which John Davenport, the most powerful clergyman in severely Puritan New Haven Colony accuses Anne Eaton, the wife of the colony’s Governor Theophilus Eaton, of opening the door to heresy in the new colony. Her theological sin is that she does not believe in the baptism of infants. At that time when the Puritans saw their lives as preparation for paradise or damnation, infant baptism was as much a passionate a red button as perhaps abortion is in our own time. Though she is a “weaker vessel,” as women’s minds were deemed at the time, Anne is very much her own woman, a daunting theological opponent. For that treason Davenport is fearful of debating her in public. Instead, he drives a wedge into Anne and Theophilus Eaton’s already stressed marriage, trawling for more easily prosecutable domestic sins, thus forcing both Anne and Theophilus to choose between their love and marriage and their faith and the fortunes of the struggling colony.