Seeing President Bush being aggressively loved in Tirana over the weekend got me to thinking about the first time I ever heard the word, “Albania”. It was 1990 and I was a junior in college at UIC. There was a group that passed out a newspaper called “The Worker”. They were ignored by most people as they stood at the bottom of the main escalators in the student union handing out fresh-printed papers, but I liked these guys.
In talking with them I found out they were Marxist-Leninists: the Marxist-Leninist Workers Organization. I immediately took this to mean, “Communist”. If you recall, being a Communist was not exactly a growth industry in 1990— nations called “Communist” were dropping left and right. But these guys were completely opposed to the Soviet Union, China, and any other state that didn’t love Josef Stalin. These guys were Stalin phreaks. They loved the guy. They said that every bad thing ever written about Stalin was a flat-out lie.
So anyway it ended up their headquarters was right in my neighborhood– the early-gentrifying Wicker Park. They were in the spot now occupied by Pacific Cafe. It was a bookstore and a meeting room. The building was owned by former Chicago Bear Gary Fencik— for some reason I loved the idea of Fencik collecting rent from Marxist-Leninists.
I got to know them better, and I found that they were all very earnest, honest, good-hearted people who were opposed to pretty much everything I was (Reagan, Bush, the first Iraq war, etc.) but also happened to think Stalin was awesome.
The only country these people thought had it right was Albania, and their greatest praise was reserved for Enver Hoxha, their recently-deceased leader. I read a lot of Hoxha speeches and stuff. I decided the guy was pretty much a nutcase.
I had started doing plays in clubs— we called them “Multi-Dimensional Modern/ Classic Club Performances”. The plays that I wrote and that we performed all had emblematic characters like “Anger”, “Desire”, “The Goddess”, and so on.
The leader of the MLWU asked me to direct and be in a “worker’s play” for them. The play was called “Make The Rich Pay” that was based on Michael Gold‘s “Strike: A Mass Recitation”. The characters were “Poverty”, “Wealth”, “Man from the Mass”— very much in tune with what we were already doing. I directed the play and also did the part of Wealth because I had a suit. Alot of my friends were in the cast, too. It was a great experience— Michael Gold was the real deal and the Mass Declamation is a completely under-appreciated genre, and he basically invented it. The big finish of the play is the entire audience standing and singing “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of what we know as “Glory Glory Halleluia”
So we did the play. We performed it at Wicker Park Fieldhouse, UIC, and the Old Town School of Folk Music. We had a lot of fun with it. Here’s a Flickr photo gallery with poster and promo cards for the show as well as my complete development script.
Thank you George Bush for sparking this tiny lesson in early 90s Wicker Park theater.
UPDATE: August 10, 2014: Fixed links to archival material. and added a video of the entire play: