AustLit

'After 18 years on death row, Marvin Lee Wilson was executed by lethal injection. But after a 2002 Supreme Court ruling, his sub-normal IQ should have disqualified him from the death sentence. Strapped to a gurney, his final statement was a plea for recognition: ‘I am a miracle’.

'Taking these words as a point of departure, playwright Declan Greene meets Wilson’s story with a work of monumental scope, spanning three continents and two hundred and forty years. In an 18th Century slave colony, a soldier is sent upriver on a suicide mission. In present-day Melbourne, a man finds himself entrapped by his carer. In Huntsville, Texas, a prisoner awaits his death. And somewhere beyond time and history, a sublime force lays a plan to rewrite the future.

'Set to a transcendent choral score, I Am a Miracle depicts a world bound to the injustices of the past – crying out for intervention. Wildly careening between the epic and the intimate, this is a mind-expanding theatrical experience / determined to change the course of history.' (Publication summary)