One of the things the play attempts to address, and I’m still working on this, is the relationship with the intelligentsia to the actual working class in the 21st Century when it’s become a very problematic, if not to say dysfunctional, relationship. So, I wanted to sort of explore that, as well that clearly among the many things that we’ve lost, are people who can’t articulate both where society, in general, might go, and also what the working class, or people who are struggling for their liberation, are actually up to. We’ve come up with categories like journalist versus activist, or historian versus farm worker. And these categories have helped produce a great divorce between word and muscle. I did some research a long time ago for a possible film about the Daily News strike in the early nineties. And one of the things that was really remarkable about it is the journalists went on strike with the guys who poured molten lead into the lead type, they were still doing that, and with the Teamsters who delivered the papers. And so, it was journalists and workers together. And it was-- until it wasn’t-- it was an effective-- an interesting strike. When I started working on, we call it IHO for short when the stagehands, Local 1 of the Teamsters, went on strike on Broadway. And I went to a couple of meetings of the Dramatist Guild expecting to find everyone kind of ready to go out and strike. The Dramatist’s Guild is not a union because we own our own copyrights, so we can’t unionize. But I expected everyone in the theater to kind of be ready to go out on strike with the stagehands. And I was sort of shocked at how the conversations really reflected the thirty plus years of Reaganite thinking about labor unions that these guys were expecting to be paid even when they weren’t needed. If you only need three stagehands, why do you have to pay the other two guys? Why can’t they go away? The short-sightedness of it, the injustice of it, hearing people who were good liberals say things like, “These guys make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year now. Their kids go to college. And they have a college fund that’s bigger than the actor’s equity fund,” and it’s like, "Great. I mean isn’t that the point? That the stage hand makes a hundred and fifty-- that can live in Great Neck or whatever, and they can send their kids to college? What, do you need them to be en-paupered to make the world seem right to you?" And if you fire stagehands every time you need a small crew, then what happens when you need a big crew? Do you really want to hire some guy off the street who’s never been backstage to be hanging out with your cast and moving your scenery around? It’s a skill. And it’s a talent. And you don’t throw people out. As Willy Loman says, “A man is not a piece of fruit.” I thought, "God, these were principles of economic justice that this country really learned the hard way in the Great Depression, and in the New Deal and we’ve forgotten so much of it.”
