Customer Reviews

Emma

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Zinn does an excellent job of introducing readers to Goldman, Berkman, Most, Reitman and others. Readers get an accurate sense of their personalities and concerns, a consequence of Zinn's ability to adapt actual source material in the dialogue.

The problem with play is that its intention seems to almost entirely consist in introducing readers to Goldman et al. Although that is a worthy aim, the play itself lacks the dramatic tension necessary to lend cohesion to its snapshots of Goldman's life. The play seems loosely organized around Berkman's incarceration and Goldman's erotic relationships. Because these events happened over several years, the play attempts to cover too much time and, consequently, lacks the dramatic intensity of a shortened time frame.

Still, for anyone who loves and studies Goldman (as I do), this is a must read. It's clear that Zinn fully appreciates the greatness of this much-neglected radical.

In all honesty, I've avoided reading Zinn's "Emma" (and his "Marx in Soho") for years because my experience with literary pieces written by scholars is that they're usually didactic and lifeless. This was stupid on my part. After all, the eloquence of Zinn's You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train brought tears to my eyes on several occasions, and one of the things that makes his People's History a classic is the beauty of his style.

So reading "Emma," when I finally turned to it, was pure pleasure. The play is divided into 2 acts with 23 scenes between them. The first act tracks Emma's life up to Alexander Berkman's assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick. The second focuses on Emma's life up to her arrest (and eventual deportation) during World War I, with special emphasis on her tumultuous love affair with Ben Reitman.

Zinn wants to pull off two things in "Emma": give the audience a good (although necessarily impressionistic) portrait of Emma Goldman the person, and also tell the audience something about her anarchist ideals and lifework. He does a good job of both, and especially manages to get across Emma's sheer love of life--"I realized my life could be...ecstatic," as she says at one point (p. 48)--that frequently set her apart from more dour, humorless fellow revolutionaries. (What might the Russian revolution have become if Lenin and Trotsky had loved life as fervently as Emma did?)

Zinn also succeeds, without being heavy-handed, in showing Emma's ongoing relevance (something he also pulls off with Marx in "Marx in Soho"). At one point in the second act, for example, Emma gives a speech on patriotism. "What is patriotism?" she asks her audience--that is, us. "Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves better, and nobler than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die to impose his superiority upon all the others. Patriotism is the nourishment of war." A member of the audience shouts in protest that "patriotism makes us a united people!" "Yes," replies Emma, "it unites us, against others!"

"Emma" is guaranteed to whet one's appetite for more, and it sent me scurrying to reread old favorites--Kropotkin, Berkman, and Emma herself--who I haven't read in ages. I'd be ecstatic if I could actually see the play performed on stage. In this day and time especially, it merits a wide audience.
_________
* Emma to Berkman, Act 1, scene 9

So, this play gets four stars...but that's being generous. However, there are no other plays written about the amazing Red Emma, so Howard Zinn gets many, many kudos for writing a play about a person whom the American government and textbook writers would seem to want to forget about. Goldman was an amazing woman--anarchist and feminist, she was a proponent of free love (homo and heterosexual), an avid fighter for workers' rights and women's reproductive rights, and an impassioned speaker. In fact, in her heyday, her speeches would have drawn crowds the likes of Martin Luther King or Barack Obama.

So, thank you, Howard Zinn for resurrecting Emma into play form. But let's be clear: Howard Zinn is not a playwright (although a stunning historian), and this is not a very good play. It's quite didactic, relatively undramatic, and long. Basically, Howard Zinn took a history book and put it into play form, without changing the style.

So, a mixed bag altogether. It's an important play, because there's not really any other play about her, but let's just say, I hope someone writes a better one soon.