Most Guilfordians know Jean Bordewich as Guilford’s Acting President, bouncing from one meeting to another on campus, eating lunch with students and meeting with prospective donors, including alumni, as part of her daily efforts to strengthen the College.

Fewer know Jean as an accomplished playwright, whose most recent work was performed this month at the U.S. Capitol. A public reading of “Electionland,” a play about the violent, highly partisan, disputed election of 1876 was staged on Capitol Hill in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Senate’s Russell Building, where the Watergate hearings and other momentous events took place.

Jean, a former Staff Director of the Senate Rules Committee, wrote the play last year before focusing her attention on serving as Acting President.

“I loved sitting back and watching the rehearsal as an audience member,” says Jean. “With the readings it’s an opportunity for me to see the script in new ways.”

Jean met with the cast and director, Jennifer Welch, after the reading to discuss adjustments to some scenes if the play evolves into a stage production. “That’s the fun part because you can take the same basic material and make it  and twist it and turn it in different ways  and it comes out with a different feeling or different sense.”

“Electionland” looks at the Presidential election of 1876, in which horrific acts of intimidation and violence – even murder – against Black voters in some parts of the former Confederacy marred the casting of ballots for the Republican Party.

On election night, it appeared that Democrat Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote. But Congress and the electoral college faced a difficult dilemma: how to turn an unfair election, when thousands were thwarted from voting, into a fair result. After months of political machinations, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president by a single electoral vote – but the political careers of many Black Republican elected officials were over.

Jean says it’s not hard to draw connections from that race to the 2020 presidential election. “People in the audience were hearing the resonance of some of these issues with our democratic institutions and voting and suppression of voting,” she says. “It’s a complicated story, but it’s a really fascinating and important one for American history and for today.”

“Electionland” was supported by StoryWorks, a documentary theater working at the crossroads of investigative journalism and community-centered free public art, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.