The extraordinary evening of theater
entitled “When in the Course of Human Events: Creative Disobedience and
the World Can’t Wait” was an extraordinary success. All 300 seats were
taken and many people had to be turned away. The lobby was packed as a
few dozen disappointed theater-goers contented themselves with watching
the event on an overhead monitor. Prominent write-ups in several local
arts and entertainment magazines attracted attention and extended the
reach of the World Can’t Wait movement as never before. [See interview
with Anna Shapiro from “Time Out” magazine elsewhere on this website.]
As the audience settled into their seats inside, they heard Tony
Kushner’s words ringing, “…I choose to believe I’m a part of the
beginning of something. I do not believe we have no ability to turn
back this terror.”
That bright thread was woven through the
evening. From many perspectives and many eras, the choices people made
and all the difference those choices made to our future were brought to
life with intense beauty, skill and humor. The stage was simple,
dominated by a large screen at the center where images of the people
being portrayed alternated with scenes of children facing the
devastation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, anti-war marchers, the
ruins of New Orleans, Cindy Sheehan (one person who has certainly made
a difference this past year) and more. Martin Luther King discovering
Thoreau, Mark Twain describing his own conversion to anti-imperialist,
the Second City’s skewering of racist stereotyping of immigrants as
‘terrorists’ was all part of the mix. The actors were among the best in
a city noted nationally for the caliber of its theater. Anna Shapiro
arranged and directed and Martha Lavey, Sheldon Patinkin and Joann
Shapiro formed the producing team. A short play by Harold
Pinter ripped the mask from the “New World Order” to reveal the
ugliness of torture and Naomi Wallace’s “The Retreating World” took us
into the world of an Iraqi veteran. Chuck Smith, playwright and
director at the Goodman Theater, read from William Faulkner’s speech
accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, which spoke to the role of
artists in historic times, another thread picked by several pieces.
Mike Nussbaum, who read Howard Zinn’s message to students at the
Chicago November 2nd rally, read from Henry David Thoreau on civil
disobedience this evening. Martha Lavey, artistic director of the
Steppenwolf, gave incomparable readings of words from Robert Kennedy Jr
and, together with James Meredith (also of Steppenwolf), excerpts from
Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church speech of April 1967.
Ann Wright, a career diplomat who resigned in protest of the invasion of Iraq,
was portrayed by Mary Ann Thebus as she described disrupting
Condoleezza Rice’s appearance before the Senate, and vowing she’d do it
better next time. But it’s not only the famous who make history. Ann
Joseph fromCongo Square theater read the testimony of Abigail Bayer, a Houston
bus driver who organized her fellow drivers to try to save the victims
of Katrina, only to be abused and ordered back themselves by the
military. Many people commented afterwards that this performance made
their hair stand on edge.
Studs Terkel was greeted with a standing
ovation as he approached the podium, throwing down his cane to dig into
a poem, Gone Away Blues, by Thomas McGrath. What age has taken from him
in strength, it has not been able to rob from his spirit. He moved the
house.
The crowd was as mixed as the offerings on
the stage, young and old, regular theater goers and theater makers and
many new to this art form. They all received a playbill featuring a ray
of sunshine attempting to pierce dark clouds and an insert with
excerpts from the World Can’t Wait Call to Drive out the Bush Regime
and a small version of the “Bush Step Down” announcement of January 31
drown-outs. Small gift bags with a whistle, January 31st flyer,
fundraising letter and magnet were also handed to everyone who
attended. Enlargements of both the December New York Times ad and the
upcoming one calling on Bush to step down were displayed behind the
World Can’t Wait tables, which were busy with flyers going out in
stacks and sales of t-shirts and DVD highlights of the first session of
the Bush commission. Funds contributed by the audience will help make
January 31st the powerful repudiation of the horrors of this regime
that millions – indeed the world – are waiting to see.