THE RIDGEFIELD PRESS

Allison Kriz

Middle schooler plays young mother
in TV biography

Written by The Ridgefield Press
Friday, January 23, 2009

Ridgefield resident Allison Kriz, a middle school student, responded to a casting call for extras in “Frederick Douglass: Pathway From Slavery to Freedom,” and will play the role of a young mother in scenes of 1830s New York City.

Frederick Douglass: Pathway From Slavery to Freedom will have its world premiere broadcast on Connecticut Public Television Sunday, Feb. 8, at 6:30 p.m. A re-broadcast airs Monday, Feb. 9 at 10:30 p.m.

Jamie Hector, best known for playing Marlo Stanfield on the HBO series The Wire, and a leading player on NBC’s Heroes, stars as Frederick Douglass in an original half-hour historical drama shot entirely in Connecticut. Ms. Kriz’s scenes were shot outside the Palace Production Center in South Norwalk last May.

Douglass was a slave who escaped to freedom and became one of our nation’s most influential abolitionists.

The first in a new series, called Young American Heroes, tells the story of the young Frederick Douglass and his escape from the horrors of slavery at the age of 20.

Filming was completed in May 2008 at a number of Connecticut locations that stand in for the Maryland plantation on which Mr. Douglass was born in the early 1800s, the home in Baltimore where he worked as a house slave as a young boy, and the train he boarded to make his escape north.

Both the TV program and an accompanying Web site (youngamericanheroes.com) are based on Frederick Douglass’s autobiography,  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself,  and use Douglass’s own words to tell his story.

<Back