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Haymarket is a powerful if pedantic lesson
BY IRIS FANGER
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Haymarket
By Zayd Dohrn. Directed by Adam Zahler. Set by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Rachel Padula-Shufelt. Lighting by Franklin Meissner Jr. Original music by Haddon Kime. With Barlow Adamson, Ken Baltin, Peter Edmund Haydu, Birgit Huppuch, Jacqui Parker, and Wesley Savick. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 16.
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Playwright Zayd Dohrn bases his living newspaper of a drama Haymarket on the events of the first few days in May 1886, when a labor march for an eight-hour working day escalated into a riot in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A small group of anarchists had called an open-air meeting to protest the shooting of workers at the McCormick Harvester plant and press their demands for improved conditions. During the confrontation between the police and the demonstrators, a bomb went off and the police fired into the unarmed crowd of 1500, the incident resulting in the death of at least six policemen and four others. The violence shook the composure of the city, with many citizens demanding justice — or blood for blood. The known anarchists were rounded up, a trial was held, and four of the eight men indicted were executed by hanging the following year, though no proof was provided that any of them had thrown the bomb. Six years later, the governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, pardoned the men remaining in jail on the ground that they’d had an unjust trial. There surely is a play in this heinous piece of history, which took place at a time when the label "anarchist" was synonymous with Anti-Christ to a power structure defending the status quo. But Dohrn, who received his MA in playwriting from Boston University, has been swamped by his sympathy with the underdogs. Of course, he must know of what he writes, being the son of Weather Underground founders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Here the anarchists who believe in a world without laws or governments are presented as earnest people fighting for the rights of the common man, in opposition to those of venal special interests supported by a corrupt police force. Every anarchist is a good guy according to Dohrn, who paints their oppressors in the darkest shades of evil. The documentary play based on actual events is back in vogue given the success of such recent works as The Exonerated, which came to the Wilbur last season and is still playing Off Broadway, and Trumbo, which is also still running in New York. This kind of drama succeeds best when it keeps to the facts and allows the truth to make its shocking points. Dohrn has audience outrage on his side and a poignant central character in Albert Parsons, the newspaper editor and dedicated anarchist who writes the fiery editorials. To Dohrn’s credit, most of his characters evince a range of motivations, though some come across as clichés. But the play turns preachy when the characters stand up and speak to the audience in monologues, and it’s occasionally sentimental as well. Despite an effective climax, there’s the tinge of a history lesson that’s been dramatized for a high-school assembly program. One misses the thrust of a work like Arthur Miller’s masterpiece The Crucible, which was based on a dark passage from America’s past but with implications for the present, or the cumulative power of the ensemble in The Laramie Project. Under the sure hand of director Adam Zahler, who has staged a crisp production, a first-rate cast of local actors bring the characters to life. They’re led by Wesley Savick in a layered portrayal of the doomed Parsons as a revolutionary who hides his passions beneath an intellectual exterior. Savick’s Parsons is almost too meek until an outburst in court when he defends the philosophy of the anarchists. Jacqui Parker is measured as his wife, Lucy, an important historical figure in her own right. The other actors — Barlow Adamson, Ken Baltin, Peter Edward Haydu, and Birgit Huppuch — double in their roles, with Haydu making an amazing transformation from the police captain, Bonfils, to Judge Gary. Huppuch is both an Irish nurse (whose accent she handles well) and an upper-class woman who shelters Parsons for a while and falls for him. In hindsight, it’s easy to condemn the good citizens of Chicago for the rush to hang innocent men. But the danger of manipulating the Bill of Rights in the face of a violent act that has inspired fear in the populace is no less lethal to democracy here and now than it was in Chicago more than a century ago. Doubtless that’s the point of Dohrn’s play.
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