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Emma
(play)
Emma (or Emma: A Play in Two Acts about Emma Goldman,
American Anarchist, its full title) is a play by historian and
playwright Howard Zinn. It was first performed in 1976.
The play dramatizes events from the life of the
real Emma Goldman. Zinn wrote the play using Goldman's autobiography,
correspondence between Goldman and fellow anarchist Alexander
Berkman (Emma's lover, who also became a character in the play),
and other research.
According to author Tom H. Hastings, the play
shows the period of Goldman's "nonviolence and resistance
to militarism", rather than her earlier "attachment
to violent revolution". After someone accuses her of plotting
to "blow up the fleet" in San Francisco harbor, she
declares "Bombs are not my way", but she "would
be happy to see the fleet sink to the bottom of the sea ... so
that we, and our brothers and sisters in other countries, can
live in peace."
The action of the play takes place during the
late 1880s, and focuses on the character of Emma Goldman as she
grows from a simple textile factory worker to a revolutionary
and anarchist. The outspoken advocacy of radical anarchist and
populist ideals are followed through persecution and hardship
to the beginnings of World War I. The play closes with the words
of Goldman during an anti-conscription protest in 1917, just before
her arrest on sedition charges.
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