New Play Ties Past Union Clashes to “Occupy” Movement

Meade, who is also the play’s director, began by taking on the persona, interestingly, of herself. She launched into what seemed at first to be a history lecture to her classroom of nine. But as she went on, she began to make statements about the play that was to follow. “This is a play about death,” she said, foreshadowing the complexities that lay ahead.

At the surface level, the play details the story surrounding the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by pro-union activists. After the bombing, Bridge and Structural Iron Workers of America union brothers John J. And James B. McNamara were arrested for the crime. As the Times at that time represented the loudest anti-union voice in Southern California, their arrest became the rallying point for a growing national debate of union versus labor. It is in this clash that one can begin to see the salience of this story in the modern context. The pro-union rhetoric preached literally from the balconies by characters like American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers (Mandi Bossard ‘11) can very easily be applied to the current debate on wealth inequality stemming from the Occupy movement.

Its a connection Meade wants the audience to make. “It’s uncanny,” she said. “This is a classic lesson in history repeating itself, of how we’re condemned to repeat the past if we don’t learn from it.”

To say the play was “experimental,” to quote its bill, would be an understatement. The play flips back and forth between past and present, using the mock classroom as the forum for an overarching narration for the portions of the history not told through the historical characters of the play itself. One notable crossover was Meade’s method for conveying the events of the bombing itself. In what the prompt described as a ‘graphic interpretation,’ the students in the present setting take turns reading a textbook’s historical description of the horrific events of the bombing. At first they seem complacent and apathetic at the gruesome description, but as the lines go on, they slowly begin to move around the textbook and eventually act out the deaths of 21 Times employees in a gross pantomime, their faces painted in emotion as if they were again in the past.

Another interesting inclusion was Yank (senior Jeffrey Adler), the loud, passionate steel worker with a thick New York accent. On first examination, Yank’s inclusion in the historic narrative around the McNamara brothers is frivolous, his lines disconnected at best to the story. But Meade’s inclusion of Yank is anything but and definitely is a creative choice that in the end worked. As Meade clarifies at the beginning of the play, every one of Yank’s lines comes straight from Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play “The Hairy Ape,” where the main character Yank also struggles to find his place as an industrial worker in the world of wealth.

The play, in short, was hardly a typical historical play. Even the sound, done by Michael Fontanesi (sophomore), eclectically throws in the Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” in the scene of the bombing. Between the incited audience participation and interaction and the intimate setting of Keck, it was an inclusive experience that not only brought the history to life but connected, while never explicitly, easily to the current dynamic of the American class struggle.