Maud

Maud, a modern-day lynching, is a Verbatim play about the February 23, 2020 murder of 25 year-old Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery, a former high school football standout, by three white men in Satilla Shores, Georgia. A video recording of the slaying of Maud by one of the assailants opened the door for a trial that gripped the world in the middle of a global pandemic.

The trial of his accused killers also brought up issues of policing — although in this case, it involved questions about private citizens and their rights to detain people who they believe to be breaking the law. Those rights in Georgia were spelled out in a controversial Civil War-era statute that was significantly weakened by state lawmakers in direct response to the outrage over the Arbery killing. Lawmakers passed Georgia’s first-ever hate crimes law as a result of the incident.