"I will do my utmost to be punctual with my postings"
Five days from now is the 83rd anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti (and Madeiros). In 1997 I had a dinner party at my loft in Chicago to commemorate the 70th anniversary. We had a forty foot long table with maps associated with the crimes drawn on the table cloths. Wooden ladders were suspended above the table, and candles were attached to make chandeliers. We ate green beans, that I think Dolores brought. This has nothing to do with anything.
During that same time period I developed a workshop show of Sacco and Vanzetti with the performance group Lucky Pierre. Lucky Pierre consisted at the time of : Michael Thomas, Mary Zerkel, Noah Loesberg, Vince Darmody and me. We had just completed a version of I Married Wyatt Earp and dedicated the next block of time to working on Sacco and Vanzetti. In part of my research I had found that Sacco and his wife would often perform in educational plays at labor and anarchist meetings. I used that fact to make the performance a blend of historical details with a fictionalized play within a play written by Sacco. Though we only presented a work in progress (called Take off your Eyeglasses), there were a number of elements that were strong that will continue or is influencing the present work:
I asked Noah to grow Vanzetti's mustache. The mustache growing has developed into its own story. I would love to figure out if I can make this blog break into branches so you could follow each subject matter separately.I developed the section involving the letter "S" described in the previous Blog post.
 read full post »

I am just beginning this blog, though obviously I had plans for it a while ago since I first set it up in 2005. I actually have been researching and developing a show about Sacco and Vanzetti (hereafter to be referred to as S&V) since the late 1990s, when I did a workshop sketch of it with Lucky Pierre in Chicago. I don't know if we ever shot that to video, but the script and some of the elements that came out of that workshop are still alive and being considered. The element with the longest life is the letter "S", misprinted because of a faulty typeset on the pamphlets found around the site of the bungled dynamite bombing of the house of A Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General of the United States in 1919. That misprinted "S" lead to the arrest of Andrea Salsedo, and eventually his defenestration from the 14th floor of the 15 Park Row building, as well as the deaths of both Sacco and Vanzetti. I will explain all of this in a bit more detail later on.

• Login or register to post comments
• Feed: SACCO AND VANZETTI AND JOE
• Original article