Chris Braak's "Red Emma' by Iron Age

Red Emma, a new one-person play, places the fiery social justice crusader Emma Goldman at Manhattan's Union Square in 1893, when she was 24, urging unemployed workers to take action: "Demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread."

For these words Goldman was arrested and convicted for "inciting to riot." How apt it was to see this play at the very moment that Egyptians, many of them unemployed, were demonstrating in Cairo.

The Philadelphia playwright Chris Braak packs plenty of information into little more than an hour, and the number of unseen characters addressed by Goldman causes some confusion. Red Emma hits its peak in Goldman's angry confrontation with Lenin after the Russian revolution became a dictatorship. It's also effective when Mary Tuonamen as Emma walks into the audience, engaging with patrons and handing them pamphlets to read. John Doyle's stage direction and Tuonamen's acting skills cleverly finesse the references to the multitude of her colleagues. In this staging, Emma imagines that she sees them sitting among us, and speaks to them intimately.

But I'd rather see and hear more about what attracted Emma Goldman to anarchism, and how she felt about being deported from her adopted homeland.

Goldman vs. my Grandpop

I also wish the play explored some dichotomies in Goldman's philosophy. She was a pacifist, yet she advocated using guns against injustice. She applauded the shooting of the coal and steel baron Henry Frick and defended the right of Leon Czolgosz to shoot President McKinley. She championed women's and workers' rights yet opposed the institution of government per se even while the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations undertook giant steps to curb some big-business abuses and improve workers' conditions.

After all, migrating to the U.S. from Russia didn't automatically make people radicals. Like Goldman, my mother's father was a Russian Jewish immigrant. He worked in a pants factory but had little use for Goldman. Grandpop Fisher, you see, worked for a family business owned by other immigrants, and he felt some unstated affinity with them.

Although he was discharged— before the days of Social Security— he never expressed anger against his former bosses, or capitalism, or government, as Emma did. Having lived under the Tsar, presumably Grandpop saw his glass in America as half-full.

Goldman, who saw only the empty half, appealed to a narrow segment of the population. Her cause was important, but it was peripheral to American life.

An actress "'far too young'?

Mary Tuonamen, who portrayed Emma, recently performed in InterAct Theatre's successful Silverhill and will play the title role in Hamlet for the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. I must quarrel with the Inquirer's critic, Howard Shapiro, who complained that the actress "is far too young...and her thoughtful performance cannot finesse her youthful looks and moves."

It's true that Tuonamen is young; also true that the production frames its story by showing Goldman at the end of her life. As is the custom in one-person biographical plays, Goldman flashes back to past events. In the make-believe world of theater, who says that we must see what Emma looked like many years after the events in question? Isn't it better to see the Emma who became famous as the young firebrand delivering that famous speech at Union Square?

More to the point: Isn't it good to see Emma as she imagines herself? If Emma was like most of us, she appeared young in her own dreams— and this form of play is above all about what's going on in her head.

According to photos, Goldman in old age was a fearful sight. (To see what I mean, click here.) But earlier, she had a sexual life. Thus it's refreshing to see her impersonated by an actress who's physically attractive.