ReelAbilities Film Festival - Film Review

ReelAbilities Film Festival 2026: Becoming Benjamin Lay

“ReelAbilities Pittsburgh showcases films that explore the lives, stories, and artistic expressions of people living with disabilities with an annual hybrid festival and year-round programming.”

–ReelAbilities Pittsburgh Homepage

When I was asked to review a film of my choice from this event (running virtually from Sept 4th to the 13th), I was immediately drawn to the synopsis for the documentary Becoming Benjamin Lay.  I love historical docudramas because many are inspirational, like Amazing Grace and One Life.  Although this film is purely a documentary, it is just as inspirational because of the thought, care, attention to detail, and human perspectives that went into production.   

This hour-long film tells the story of Benjamin Lay, a radical advocate of abolition, environmentalism, and feminism in colonial America who was very passionate, unapologetic in his beliefs, and far ahead of his time.  His story is told from the perspective of a one-man play written by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker and performed by Mark Povinelli.  Wallace and Rediker speak of coming across Benjamin Lay’s writings, and realizing that the people of his time and beyond purposely buried his historic, life-long journey of fighting for social change in his Quaker community and the wider world.  Mark brings Benjamin’s struggles and convictions to life in a visceral way, made all the more authentic by the two men’s shared dwarfism. 

I say ‘visceral’ because Benjamin Lay himself used physicality and theatrics to be very loud, direct, and in-your-face so that even if fellow colonials wanted to forget their encounters with him and his ideas, they could not.  His family’s time in Barbados and experience of the slave trade there was a foundation block of his advocacy efforts.  He could not escape seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling it while living there so no one else who benefitted from the blood and labor of slaves should be able to escape it on his watch.

Lay became so consistently disruptive that even most Quakers in England and America disowned him.  Despite popular culture’s whitewashing of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers participated in the slave trade, owned slaves, and profitted from this institution.  They had no desire to confront their own flaws in every meeting, so Benjamin Lay was made to wait until his final years to hear of his fellow Friends shunning slavery. 

From the very start of the film, Mark Povinelli emphasizes that Lay’s story needed telling because of its historical significance rather than only because of his dwarfism, but Povinelli is also honored to be giving a realistic portrayal of that fundamental influence on Lay’s life and actions.  He also loves being able to inhabit Benjamin Lay as a character because he gets to control people’s perception of him and his body while enthralling them on stage. 

The documentary also connects all these different aspects of Benjamin Lay’s personality and advocacy to current times and how history is repeating itself.  Working class slavery, environmental degradation on a global scale, and the oppression of femme-presenting people in many societies around the world are still happening.  People with disabilities are still treated as less than human on a routine basis.  The fight, as Benjamin would be sad to learn, is far from over almost 300 years later.  But, as Mark Povinelli shows in his role as Lay and as a modern advocate for his community, the more people are shown the parallels through this performance art, the more they will connect them to actions that can and should be taken today.

This resonated with me, especially when Mark said, “We are complicit in this world we’ve built.”  Every one of us has a part to play in making the world safe and beautiful for all people.  For me it means consciously thinking about how to live more sustainably and how to incorporate universal design and accessibility into my thinking.  What does it mean to you?       

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My name is Lucy, and I am the University of Pittsburgh Social Work intern at TRCF for the 2026-2027 school year.  I hope to learn how to better serve the Pittsburgh community by learning with Anne!