Up the Union!

Sweet By-and-By, Pig Iron Theatre Company and Theatre Sláva, conceived and written by Daniel Rudholm, Dan Rothenberg and Dito van Reigersburg. Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, August 29–September 13, 2008.

This year’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival featured more than 200 performances (including the popular Festival Fringe) taking over the city’s cultural venues and streets. Based on the small sampling of shows I saw, and a perusal of some of the programming that I didn’t, it would appear that a subtheme of this year’s international offerings was focused on investigating American folkloric images and their contested history refracted through a critical lens. One prime example was Sweet By-and-By produced by the local favorite Pig Iron Theatre Company in conjunction with Sweden’s Theatre Sláva. Sweet By-and-By, presented an unabashedly nostalgic look backward with a spirited narrative from the twentieth-century American labor movement. In doing so it made a committed effort to reach across the performer-audience divide to create a present-day sense of shared community and renewed faith in the power of the laboring body and working class perspective. In a political season rife with the polemics of a newly revitalized class conflict in this country, Sweet By-and-By announced a salvo through a backward look to origins.

The production wore its American heart on its progressive political sleeve. This solo performance by Daniel Rudholm, directed by Pig Iron co-founder Dan Rothenberg from a concept shared with Dito van Reigersberg was a heartfelt tribute to the Swedish-American labor activist and martyr Joe Hill, best known as a member of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, and as a song-writer (“There is Power in a Union,” “Casey Jones: Union Scab”). Hill was executed in 1915 for the murder of two men in a Salt Lake City butcher shop the previous year, a murder he likely did not commit, after being vilified in the press for his union associations and work during this fertile period for American labor activism. According to IWW legend, after his body was cremated, envelopes of ashes were sent to each union local office where they made their way to various countries for

Daniel Rudholm in Sweet By-and-By, Pig Iron, 2008. Courtesy Theatre Slava.

scattering. Sweet By-and-By maintained an unapologetic, un-ironic populism from its opening offering: “How do you piss off a room full of Americans? Talk about politics!”

Rothenberg and company wove the raw elements of Hill’s life and music with other more personal narrative elements relating Rudholm’s great-grandfather, a Seventh-Day Adventist who, after the famous Great Disappointment of 1844, which did not produce the Rapture and end times, made his way to the United States from Sweden to follow in Hill’s footsteps. The twinned stories trace less a narrative of either man’s life than an impressionistic palimpsest told from Rudholm’s point of view as inheritor of an extended family tradition of class awareness and pride. Appropriately, the roughly hewn scenic design emphasized the bare space with only essential props, including the several musical instruments with which Rudholm evinced striking proficiency. In a masterful sequence, he multitracked four separate vocal lines with foot-controled electronics, creating a live four-part harmony which brought out the full emotional valences of Hill’s memorable rabble rouser “There’s a Power.” Even the video, sparingly used, revealed a handmade aesthetic, comprised of animations credited to Rudholm himself. The black and white clip-art images appear to have been taken from newspaper drawings of the period, and their faux-primitif illustrations of the sung lyrics melded seamlessly with Hill’s satirical number “Mr. Block,” which is based on a cartoon strip about a haplessly beleaguered laborer. The video was projected onto a collection of the memorial envelopes that hung from the ceiling in the form of a large grid from which Rudholm removed several, one by one, in order to torch them and release their contents as part of the performance...