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.
I built a "cage" replicating the one defendants used to sit in during trials in Massachusetts.
I worked from trial transcripts, editing together the testimony of one witness from the Grand Jury trial, the actual trial, and the various depositions. This highlighted the changes in the opinions/ memories of the witness as time passed. ( "He is definitely not the man" becomes " I believe he resembles the man I saw" becomes "I am positive that is the man I saw with the gun").
I worked with the performers on how to "present" a foreign accent. I didn't want people to pretend to speak Italian. But issues with understanding and language barriers is critical to the story. The most interesting variation in such a "presentation" was to cut a small slit in a sheet of paper that you slid across the text in a book. The slit only let you read two or three words at a time. The pause caused by moving the piece of paper, as well as the altered cadence and stress, made the text sound more like the patterns of a non-native speaker.
