The Haymarket-style social anarchism that Emma Goldman preached as an early-20th-century activist was supposed to lead to individual freedom but not chaos. As practiced in Bettencourt's attempted hagiography, however, it's total disarray. The play focuses on the World War I era, when Goldman and her partner, Alexander Berkman, were speaking out against Woodrow Wilson's military draft; they were arrested and sentenced to two years in jail under the dissent-suppressing Espionage Act. Goldman was shipped off to a prison facility in Jefferson City, Missouri.
All of this is true, if not particularly well told in Bettencourt's ham-fisted first act. His platitude-laden dialogue sounds as if it was assembled from fortune cookies: "We'd all be better at living if we understood dying"; "I am what greed does." And his oil-and-water efforts at blending realism with extended fantasy sequences grate; Goldman and Berkman's trial is the longest half-assed commedia dell'arte scene we hope ever to sit through. But it's behind bars in Act II that things really go off the rails. The gaggle of cell mates the playwright sketches is straight out of a '50s women-in-prison flick, yet in one long, listless session in the prison yard, Goldman makes converts of them with warmed-over Oprah-speak about self-worth.
Schroeder's cast is largely ill-suited to gravitas, and his directorial hand has been far too light; in most scenes, the actors meander about a bare stage so randomly that we mentally traced their paths in Family Circus-style dotted lines. The play takes its title from Goldman's apocryphal quote, "If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming." This joyless affair displays little aptitude for either.
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