The Alley Cat Players present a one-woman play about Emma Goldman that's part history lesson, part poetic reverie.
By ROBERT HICKS
Published August 12, 2004
[Photo: Alley Cat Players]
Teresa Elena Gallar stars in the one-woman show Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy & Other Affairs.
Emma Goldman, whose name has come to be synonymous with anarchy, free speech and sexual freedom, was born into the repression of a Lithuanian Jewish ghetto in 1869. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, before immigrating to America.
She distributed birth control literature when it was a crime to do so. She was suspected in plots to assassinate factory managers and political leaders. She tried to obstruct the U.S. military draft during World War I, which led to her deportation to Russia, just in time to witness the revolution. Goldman eventually returned to Chicago, where she died in 1940, but not before earning the label of "most dangerous woman in America" from none other than J. Edgar Hoover.
The Alley Cat Players are presenting Jessica Litwak's take on the famed anarchist, Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy & Other Affairs, with Teresa Elena Gallar starring in the one-woman show at the NT Village Music Garden in downtown Tampa, starting Friday.
Director Jo Averill-Snell said Litwak's play is ideal for Alley Cat, which until recently was based in Seminole Heights.
"We're constantly troving for scripts that fit our mission," said Averill-Snell. "Some of the things that we focus on are humanist scripts about the good things in life. We seek out plays that have strong roles for women and that show a lust for and joy for life."
Emma Goldman is Alley Cat's second performance in Tampa's newest theater space, which occupies the old 911 nightclub on Franklin Street just north of Tampa Theatre. The theater gets its name from its operators, the National Trust for the Development of African-American Men.
The first Alley Cat production in the theater, Mollie Bailey's Traveling Family Circus Featuring Scenes From the Life of Mother Jones, also dealt with forceful women of the 19th century who ignored social restrictions.
Litwak's play is a poetic reverie on Goldman's anarchist beliefs and inner life, with references to the historical events in her life. A former sewing machine operator in a corset factory, Goldman was shocked by police shootings of striking workers at McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago and the infamous bombing that followed in Haymarket Square. She decided then to devote her life to anarchism and eventually was associated with an attempt to kill the manager of a Carnegie Steel plant in Pennsylvania, where striking workers had been attacked.
But the play is not a history lesson. "The play is not, strictly speaking, a biography, and it's certainly not documentary," Averill-Snell said. "It's a memory play in some parts. Then there's that beautiful "I believe' section that's a statement of her philosophy."
Besides her fascination with Goldman as an early feminist and free spirit, Averill-Snell also was drawn to the play for its theatrical possibilities.
"It gives us a lot of scope for making lighting changes, working with projection and being able to move around very fluidly in time and place," she said. "That's very much us."
PREVIEW: Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy & Other Affairs, Friday through Aug. 29, Alley Cat Players at the NT Village Music Garden, 911 Franklin St., Tampa. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday. $10 general, $7 seniors and students. Special Artists' Night production Aug. 23, all tickets $5. 813 231-8478; www.alleycatplayers.org
