House, Divided
 La Tempestad
 The Ballad of John Wesley Reed
 Girl Science
 The Allure of Oriental Wisdom
 Memorial Day (formerly Varia)
 Pride of the Lion
 The Dostoyevsky Man


 Monica for Chanukah
 Angie and Arnie Sanguine
 Edward and Ellie Supine
 The Lion Eats His Lunch
 The Lion in His Lair
 The Lion Leaves His Mark
 Prayers


 But Who's Counting?
 Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium


 Just Before the War Between the Plates
 I Can Handle That


 Talking  with Lee Blessing

...with Tom Coash
...with Mary Fengar Gail
...with Richard Kalinowsky
...with Jamie Pachino
...with David Rambo
...with Jason Sherman
...with Naomi Wallace
...with Tom Gibbons
...with Dick Goldberg

Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium is a monologue for a 30 year old woman.

Synopsis:

Emma Goldman gives a speech December 31, 1899, imagining what the world will be like a hundred years later.

Characters:

Emma Goldman, anarchist, activist, educator, public speaker. Around 30.

Setting:

The stage of a small auditorium.

Playing time:

Seven minutes.

Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium

Writing, development, and performance history:

Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium was written in response to a call for entries from InterAct Theatre Company for monologues about the millennium. It was chosen as the show opener for that program, and was performed and published as part of 2000 Voices, Monologues for the Millennium, at InterAct Theatre. Performances were Jan. 13-16, 2000.

SAMPLE SCENE:

EMMA GOLDMAN

Comrades. Knowing the risks you have taken to be here, I am especially glad to see you all again. When the roll call of the brave is read, you will all be on the tally. You are part of the long march which extends from antiquity to our own time of those who have stood up for their rights. You have all seen the police wagons out front, and the bulls with their billy sticks. This is how they keep us off guard, wondering whether tonight is the night the order will be given to crack heads. I have often wondered how it is that we, the weakest and poorest members of society, pose so much of a threat that force is needed to subdue us for gathering in a modest hall like this one and sharing our ideas. But it speaks to the power of our ideas that the guardians of property are poised with fists and clubs to try to smash our dreams. Because you are brave enough to stand up against injustice, because you choose to risk your personal safety to walk the path to a better world, you will be heroes to your children, and you will be acclaimed by the yet unborn as the giants of our age. You are who the future beneficiaries of our actions will hearken back to when all the victories for freedom have been won.

Tonight, at midnight, four hours from now, we will enter the twentieth century, and our struggles against the evils and hypocrisies of our time will enter their second century. Against what do we struggle today? We struggle against all laws which limit or curtail our personal freedoms, or which govern our pleasures, or which seek to take our bodies from our control, or which seek to force us to make war on our comrades, or which keep us from the dignity of a fair share of the value of what we produce by our labor. We seek nothing less than the absolute right to self determination.

So often I am asked, when will our victory come? My friends, I do not have the answer. But I can imagine the Millenium, and I want to tell you what I believe it will be like to live in America one hundred years from today.

If you walk down the streets of the Lower East Side today, you will find the sidewalks crowded with the dispossessed, hungry for work. Jews, Poles, Italians, Germans, Irish, and Africans. Seven years ago, speaking on behalf of the unemployed at a rally in Union Square, I quoted a renown cleric who said, 'If you are suffering, go to the houses of the rich and ask for work. If they will not give you work, ask for bread. If they will not give you bread, take bread. Bread is your right.' For saying this, I was hounded by the police in two cities until I was arrested in Philadelphia. For speaking three sentences of exhortation to a crowd of destitute and desperate men and women, for reciting a commonplace of ecclesiastical spirit to a collection of starving workers, I spent a year at Blackwell's island prison as a seditionist for inciting riot. I was jailed among women so poor and desperate they had sold their bodies to men to earn money for bread. Nearby, men so poor and desperate that they had picked up the knife or gun to avail themselves of bread, were likewise jailed. These women and these men, wives and husbands and sons and daughters of workers like yourselves, wanted no more than to provide life's sustenance for themselves and their children.

Now, seven years later, the numbers of immigrant poor clamoring for work and bread and dignity in New York City and elsewhere multiplies daily. These are not foolish people. These are not stupid people. These are people with souls sensitive enough to want to escape the hardship of life in their home countries, who have been lead to come here, like yourselves, believing what America tells the world about herself, about opportunity, about freedom. These new arrivals may be without the language or the clothes or the means to present a respectable face to their neighbors, but they are not without self respect. It is only that without work, shame follows them; they sleep on the streets and in doorways eating the garbage discarded by their neighbors until the police bulldogs sweep them away. It is these people for whom we struggle. When I picture the millenium, I picture a world where no one sleeps on the streets, where no one remains homeless, where no one is oppressed for the single reason of poverty, and where the comforts of property do not take precedence over the values of humanity. This is our struggle. To free ourselves from the worn platitudes of governance, from the medieval notions of ownership. And it will happen, as surely as I stand here, by a hundred years from now, if we stand in unity as we do today and do not fear our oppressors. For it is fear alone that will defeat us. Surely, as we have shaken off the entrapments of slave ownership in this century, in the upcoming century we will refuse the oppressions which now restrict our freedoms. Surely in the next hundred years the right of all workers to share in profits, and of all women to control their bodies, of all men to refuse to take up arms against each other, and of all adults to celebrate their pleasures will become the commonplace. One hundred years from tonight there will be no America as we know it, with its disregard of the poor and its genteel classes insulated from the plight of the working man. The day will come when what we need and what we have will balance each other, and the stature of mankind will be raised.

Tonight we stand, at the gateway to the era when we will see the emergence of a new man. Free. Unfettered. Strong. Without the chains of false laws to hold him from what he rightly deserves.

But what is the method of our struggle? Resistance, unity, and resolve. Resistance to material co-optation, to sanctioning the actions of brutes with silence. Unity demonstrated in gatherings like this, because if we do not freely associate then they have succeeded in dividing us and we are already defeated. And resolve. Resolve to win the human victory it is our duty to win.

I believe that in the end we will win, for I believe that they cannot stop us. One hundred years from now, people will look back at us and at those who have fallen in our struggle and they will remember what we have won for them. A hundred years from now your children and grandchildren will live the lives emboldened by their creative spirits. Art, theater, and entertainment will not be vulgar reflections of the aspirations of the rich to decadence, but will instead raise the spirits of all men and women to the possibilities of life. The artificiality of so-called respectable life will hold no more sway. All life will be respectable. All choices. This is what life will be at the millenium. This is what it will be to have our struggles won. Comrades, I greet you on the eve of the new century.

For information on performance rights, please contact Larry@loebell.com.