Riveting musical blends labor history, individual passions

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues. or Wed., July 16, 17 or 18, 2018

CHICAGO – The theater isn’t necessarily the best place to learn history. However: “Hamilton,” “Chicago,” “Inherit the Wind,” “The Crucible.,” … We learn in lively ways.

The original musical “Haymarket” – presented by the Underscore Theatre Company at the Den Theatre on North Milwaukee Avenue here – has mere days remaining in its run (with 7:30 p.m. performances Thursday-Saturday and the closing performance at 3 Sunday afternoon). It’s as worth the trip as it is valuable to recall the century-old cries of “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will!”

Based on historical events surrounding workers’ unrest about 16-hour days and their struggle at a time pitting “dollars against dimes,” the musical, broadly, is about five innocent men dying at the hands of state vengeance against labor, a storyline told through the eyes and acts of the core participants.

The plot takes place in the spring and summer of 1886, starting with a general strike in Chicago on May Day, a violent backlash by police and thugs at McCormick Reaper Works May 3, when strikers were killed, followed by a May 4 rally against police brutality where a small bomb was thrown, injuring or killing protestors and police. Various labor leaders were arrested, and eight were tried in July and convicted in August. After appeals, in November of 1887, one committed suicide in prison, four were hanged, and three others were sent to the penitentiary.

In response to the bosses’ fatal attacks at McCormick, some of the group advocates direct action, others oppose resorting to employer-style violence.

“They won’t give us what we ask because we ask for it,” it’s said. Another argues, “They have to be afraid of us.”

First performed in 2016, the play has been refined and refreshed. Now, with 12 multi-talented young actors – most of whom also play instruments – “Haymarket’s” scope is modest in scale but epic in effect.

In two acts with 12 songs each, the play is a collaboration, but Bridget Adams-King as Lucy Parsons is the frequent focus, and other standouts are Erik Pearson as her unequal partner and husband, organizer Albert Parsons, and T. J. Anderson as radical newspaperman August Spies. Each is spellbinding in different ways: Adams-King as the talent taken for granted if not overlooked entirely; Pearson as the passionate intellectual who successfully organizes across trades and nationalities; and Anderson as the stammering wallflower of sorts who becomes an inadvertent catalyst.

Wearing period attire on a sparse stage with facsimiles of gas lights and a brick-wall background, the cast faces theatergoers on three sides in the intimate storefront venue.

Musicals always face the challenge of conveying a story almost exclusively through lyrics, but together with a few lines (delivered almost as asides to the audience), “Haymarket” achieves its telling.

Despite a potentially dispiriting tale, composer David Kornfield and writer Alex Higgin-Houser make this a rollicking production. It features roots music, blending bluegrass and folk in an appropriate Americana-flavored score that’s often joyful and uplifting even as evil and doom shadow the edges. Rabble-rousing tunes are mostly upbeat, with a few ballads, all relying on splendid vocals and acoustic instruments including guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and piano, augmented by a subtle electric bass.

One number, the lighthearted yet dark “Courtroom Circus,” is about the sham of the trial, which had a stacked jury and a biased judge in addition to a lack of evidence. Still, Spies (depicted as an ineffective speaker) delivers a stirring oration at their sentencing that sounds like Elmer Gantry voiced by Bernie Sanders.

(The trial was such a mockery of a fair proceeding that Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld in 1893 pardoned the three surviving men.)

Lucy, with other wives, for months toured the world pleading their case, and after their execution she continued her activism for decades, eventually joining others in launching the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW – the Wobblies) and living until 1942.

After the trial, Ill. Gov. Richard Oglesby cynically offers to commute the death sentences if the men renounced the labor movement. However, the group considers and rejects it, finally accepting their unjust fate, and hope is devoured by despair.

Still moved by the doomed Paris Commune of 1871, the condemned men sing “La Marseillaise” on the gallows. The climax, though anticipated, is jarring.

Recounting how a handful of real people were swept away by incidents and excitement (heroic and audacious, malicious and evil), “Haymarket” also shows how individuals – even passionate, committed figures – can become the Past, then History, then nearly forgotten.

With an overall effect that’s emotional, engendering rage, pride and determination, “Haymarket” is enlightening, entertaining and even inspiring.

[The Den Theatre’s box office phone is (773) 697-3830.]