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.
So I am developing a show about the case. I have read, by my count, numerous books on the case, both pro and con of their innocence. The show is intended to have two parts: a gallery exhibition and a performance. The gallery exhibition will have various displays centered around an automata diorama that re-enacts the actual crime ( I will detail the other displays later in this blog). The main diorama will have miniature video cameras positioned within the scale model from the vantage point of the major witnesses, so that the viewers can experience exactly what the witnesses saw, and can compare it to their testimony from the trial.
The performance I will start to explain at my next posting. I just wanted to right now start the blog, and maybe whet your appetite.
I will do my utmost to be punctual with my postings.
I hope you can find it amusing.
Yours,
Joseph
