Wed. March 24

Howard Zinn - historian, activist, friend - appeared a number of times in this space, as regular readers know. Most recently, it was about the screenings of Zinn's "The People Speak" movie, the celeb-studded doc he maded with Chris Moore. It aired on History late last year. (Down lower in this item, I've included a version of a piece I wrote about the readings Zinn and company staged at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in late 2007.) Zinn, who died Jan. 27 at 87, was, of course, best known for his revisionist history, "A People’s History of the United States."

   The book, Bruce Springsteen told Rolling Stone,"had an enormous impact on me. It set me down in a place that I recognized and felt I had a claim to. It made me feel that I was a player in this moment in history, as we all are, and that this moment in history was mine, somehow, to do with whatever I could. It gave me a sense of myself in the context of this huge American experience and empowered me to feel that in my small way. I had something to say I could do something. It made me feel a part of history, and gave me life as a participant.”
   It’s exactly what Zinn  - Boston University Professor Emeritus - tried to instill in his students going back to the 1960s. And over the past few decades he attracted liberal musicians – like Springsteen, Billy Bragg and Eddie Vedder - and actors to his work. Few things help spread an intellectual’s work as celebrity endorsement. Especially when the celebrity has credibility in his or her own right. And Zinn - as passionate as he was about his beliefs - was a kind and generous man. He didn't live in a left-wing ivory tower. He didn't consider himself the Authority and his followers as his fan base. (Anyone who's followed political theorists or any stripe know this is not often the case.)
   One thing not as well-known about Zinn is that he was a playwrite. He wrote three plays, about Karl Marx, Emma Goldman and the arms race, and they're going to be packaged in a book, "Three Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn" and released mid-March. Also, at Suffolk, there's "A Tribute to the Theater of Howard Zinn," March 24 at 6, with actor Chris Cooper, Anthony Estrella, Will LeBow, Catilin Langstaff, Elise Manning and Dossy Peabody reading from the plays. Zinn's son, Jeff, who runs the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, will have an onstage discussion about his father's work as a playwrite with my former colleague at the Globe, theater critic Ed Siegel.

I asked Ed his take: "How does Howard Zinn measure up as a playwright? He could never have given Roy Cohn the great lines that leftist playwright Tony Kushner gave him in 'Angels in America.' He couldn’t have made moral ambivalence a virtue the way that Tom Stoppard does in 'The Real Thing.' Or left the audience with the sense of dread that Edward Albee does in play after play.

 But Zinn’s plays call to me, just as the works of great playwrights do, and not because he was also a friend. Why? Because they represent the uncompromising vision of a great mind. His plays throw out the theatrical rulebook in the same way that his political writing threw out the rules of 'objective' historicism. In both areas he moved to his own drummer. Who says you have to give great lines to people you despise? Who says you can’t make philosophy the stuff of drama? Who says you have to see people and politics in shades of gray and that there’s no room for heroes in our day and age?

 Of course, he covers much of that ground in his political books, so why write plays? The simple answer is he loved the theater. Chekhov moved him as much as Marx. (Well, maybe not quite as much.) He was also aware that the arts serve a different function than political science. I once asked him about the charge that political plays preach to the converted, and his answer was that the converted need preaching to. It’s one thing to know that racism is wrong. It’s quite another to feel it in your bones the way that Lorraine Hansberry makes you feel it in “A Raisin in the Sun.”

 One could write an op-ed about Karl Marx’s relevance to today’s world. Many have, to usually soporific effect. But to bring him back to life and have him address the issue himself (channeled, of course, through Zinn) cuts through historical cobwebs in an infinitely more involving way.  And that was Zinn’s accomplishments in all walks of life, to teach us to put aside one’s preconceptions and think of the world in more creative ways. So he wasn’t a great playwright in any of the ways that we normally define the term. But there are a select group of playwrights whose work I would always go out of my way to see – Kushner, Stoppard and Albee were among them. And so were Howard Zinn’s."

   I saw just one of Zinn's plays, "Marx in Soho." This is an edited version of a piece I did on it for the Boston Phoenix in February 2007.
 
  Who would brave arctic weather to watch Karl Marx pontificate? More specifically, an actor portraying Marx in a one-man show penned by lZinn. They’d have to be …
    “Crazy,” said Zinn, before “Marx in Soho” just before the show at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway.
     “Nuts,” offered his wife, Roz.
     But this is Somerville – a stone’s throw from the People’s Republic – and a sold-out crowd of 200 came for an evening of entertainment, edification and, yes, wit. Take Ron Rechnitz, a middle-aged Bostonian, in the audience:  “I have a passion for justice, creativity and ingenuity, and a sensitivity to what’s best for the greatest number of people.”
     Bob Weick played a middle-aged Marx, who was granted an hour to return to earth and discuss his time in the 19th century - and observe ours in the 21st. Marx, who feels he’s been misrepresented by history, sees lots of similarities. Poverty, war, and raging capitalism, to name three. And he thinks the case he made for socialism then stands up pretty well now.
    After the show, Sam McFarland, one of three 17-year-old pals from Cambridge Rindge & Latin, said he’d previously heard Marx “described in a dark sense, like a crazy person.” Here, “I felt like he was much more human.” Classmate Max Borg praised Marx’s sense of rage, intellect, humor and grief.
    “Marx in Soho” began with the cash register sound effects from Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Weick took the stage and pondered the dialectic of how he could be dead and, yet, alive in a Somerville basement. (Originally, this was set in Soho, New York, where Marx was dropped due to bureaucratic error. He was supposed to be put back in Soho, London, where he’d once lived. C’est la vie. Or mort.)
    This was a multi-layered evening, where socialist ideals were explained rationally and Soviet Union co-opting of them dissed profoundly, where the evil rich of the 1800s met their equals at Enron.
    “It was Howard Zinn talking through Karl Marx,” said host Jimmy Tingle before the Q-and-A. During that part, Zinn spoke of fighting the good fight. “Does the hope come from Marx himself?” said Zinn.

   “Yes. He was off by 200 years, but he was confident capitalism would reach the point where it would change.”
 
   And here's a edited version of the Cutler readings Zinn held originally written for www.newengland.com.

    Last month, the rangy, Zinn took the stage four times at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. He was introducing readings that by number of well-known actors, Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, among them. They were performing passages from two of Zinn’s books, “A People’s History of the United States” and its spinoff, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.” With anti-war and anti-Bush dissent everywhere, Zinn’s views veer closer and closer to what people out in the real world are thinking.
   The first book, initially published in 1980, passed the million mark and each year surpasses the previous one in sales. The latter book – encouraged and edited by his friend Anthony Amove, formerly of the South End Press – used the words, songs, speeches and poems of some of those people, famous, infamous and relatively unknown. The words of Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Twain and Henry Thoreau were heard alongside the voices of obscure union organizers, mill workers and soldiers. It is these voices the actors at the Cutler brought to the stage, giving them weight, substance and, yes, star power.
    What links them? “A resistance to illegitimate authority,” says Zinn. It is history “that’s different from the history books people had in school.” It was not about presidents, generals and conquest. “The point of view was of people who’d gotten into trouble and had to fight back, dissidents and troublemakers of all kinds – the people who have given us the freedom of democracy we have. ” The book, he added, grew out of the various ‘60s and  ‘70s movements – anti-war, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights – and it chronicles, “We are hoping these voices of the past will speak clearly to the present,” says Zinn.
    And, hence, this project. Zinn and his longtime friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with producer Chris Moore (“American Pie’) hatched the idea a decade or so back: They’d bring the historian’s (and his subjects) words to life, via film. “There’s a lot of apathy out there,” said Moore and in doing this they were “trying to bring this to a bigger audience, ‘cause we’re the Hollywood guys.” (Damon and Affleck met Moore during “Good Will Hunting,” on which he worked as co-producer.) Moore said their idea was to get people “to realize if you sit home and watch MTV and ESPN you’re affecting history in the wrong way – you’re doing nothing.”
    They discussed different approaches, but ultimately they broke down books into four parts: Class, Women, Race and War. At the Cutler, the individual readings ranged up to three hours. There were occasional retakes. This wasn’t a theatrical show; it was a performance done on stage for film, as was explained to the oft-packed house. The readings will form the basis of whatever film is to come. A lot of that, Moore readily admits, is still up in the air. A version of this concept was pitched to and rejected, ultimately, by FOX and HBO.  (Yes, Moore is amused it made it up the FOX chain before someone realized what Zinn was presenting was diametrically opposed to the FOX worldview.) Moore is not overly concerned. He believes “The People Speak” will find its way to the public – whether it be on DVD, on TV or theatrically – before the November election. (There are plans to return to Boston in April to shoot more musical segments, and isolated, smaller readings will happen around the country, later.)
      At a press conference on the second day of the performances, I asked Mortensen if there was any trepidation participating in a “radical” version of American history. He bristled, slightly. “Not radical,” he responded. “I’d say ‘the truth.’ And it’s not just one political stripe this has. … It’s not a communist manifesto, or ‘union friendly,’ or ‘women friendly.’ It’s mostly about untold stories and about oppressed points of view. “ Later that night, Mortensen sang an impassioned, a cappella rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.”
      Of the voices in Zinn’s book, Brolin, co-star of “No Country for Old Men,” said, “It’s a personal account. You can’t argue with a personal account.”
      Actor David Straithorn said one reason the project was undertaken was “to get the conversation going, just to get people talking.”
      For Glover, who can currently be seen in the blues movie “The Honeydrippers,” doing “The People Speak” was a no-brainer. “I’m 60,” he said. “My connection goes back to my great-grandmother. I’m the embodiment of so many (of her) stories. We see the hard work, the ongoing work of seeking justice. It’s important to understand history in a broader form. We are the architects of history. … You have to engage in every aspect of political life. The idea that we’re disempowered is imposed upon us.”
      One primary goal of “The People Speak” is debunk long-held myths and challenge common assumptions. He left no doubt about his mission when he began “A People’s History of the Unites States” with Christopher Columbus’s “invasion.” (Columbus’s words about conquering the natives were spoken by Brolin in “The People Speak.” – “All can be held in subjugation and made to do whatever one might wish.”)
     At the Cutler, Zinn spoke about the oft-held belief that America is a class-free society.  “We have always had class conflict,” he said. “ Riots for food before the Revolution, slavery, a rebellion that spawned the Constitutional Convention.” Zinn upends the cliché (truism?) that history is what the winners write. The people Zinn writes about – and the voices he chooses to use – are not losers, per se, but their viewpoints are often marginalized or ignored.
     There were numerous stirring moments at the Cutler. A handful: Tomei delivered Emma Goldman’s bold treatise on love and marriage, saying they had “nothing in common.” The former was a form of bondage; the latter was something rapturous that “defied all laws and conventions.” Most people know Helen Keller as the famous blind, deaf and dumb girl who rose above her disabilities. Christine Kirk gave us another side of Keller, reading what Keller wrote about World War I: War was to “protect the interest of the capitalists. Every modern war has had its roots in exploitation.” Jasmine Guy spoke Alice Walker’s words about rejecting an offer to visit the White House from President Bill Clinton, citing America’s anti-Cuban policy. Kathleen Chalfant read Adrienne Rich’s letter to Jane Alexander refusing the National Medal for the Arts, because of Clinton’s “destruction of New Deal programs.” Rapper Darryl McDaniels (DMC of Run-DMC), read from David Walker’s “Appeal,” about the Declaration of Independence, asking “Do you understand your own language? Like, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … with your cruelties on us?”  Reg E. Cathey gave a scathing reading of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 essay “The Meaning of the Fourth for the Negro,” calling Independence Day a “scorching irony. … The hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed! This is a day that reveals more than all the other days the gross injustice to which (the Negro) is the constant victim.” R&B singer John Legend performed Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
       Forced to pick one segment, I’d choose Brolin wrenching passage from Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun.”  Trumbo’s protagonist is a limbless, faceless World War I veteran. He is, essentially, a torso with a brain … who learns to tap out messages in Morse code with his head. Among his thoughts: “Take me on a tour – this thing who thinks he is alive…. Take me where people work, take me to colleges and concerts. Show the girls, fathers, sons.” The decimated soldier wants to be paraded as an example of the “glory” of war, truly the horror of it.
      There was a lot of articulate anger tossed around on stage. At points, you felt like the United States is, was and always has been a mass of multi-layered hypocrisy, with the power structure forever tilted toward the entitled. But there was also the kind of righteous surge, not unlike what I felt during an anti-war rally in London in 2003, before the invasion. You felt a bond with these people – in the audience and on stage.  Zinn put it this way: “People are leaving with a feeling of elation. They almost don’t want it to stop.”
     Inevitably someone asked Zinn who he supported in the presidential race. “Sure it’s better to have A than B… but this is not about who sits in the White House but who pickets the White House. Change has always come from below and the presidents and the Supreme Court have to react to that.”
     “I hope,” said Mortensen, “that (‘The People Speak’) will inspire doubt and hope, profound skepticism about what to think and profound optimism in finding (things) out for yourself.” hope it will inspire doubt and hope, profound skepticism about what to think and profound optimism in finding (things) out for yourself.”
    Each performance of the run closed with a different actor reading these words from Frederick Douglass’s “West India Emancipation”: “If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress.”

The Suffolk event at The C. Walsh Theatre is free, but you'll want to call and reserve a seat.

Footnote: Howard and I went to Sox games now and then. I share in a season ticket plan. I just inadvertantly punched up an e-mail from Hward, April 2008. I'd been bitching about Terry Francona's nature of playing relief pitching by the book, not gong with the hot hand, having certain pitchers for particular situations and innings. Howard e-mailed back: "Yes, sometimes Francona's tactics are frustrating, like when he takes a pitcher out who's been pitching beautifully and puts in, not Okajima or Papelbon, but Timlin and Tavarez." Smart baseball man, too, Howard Zinn.

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