Uncivil Disobedience (review)

On August 24, 1970, a small group of activists detonated a bomb outside of an army research facility on the campus of the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison in the hope of striking a blow against the Vietnam War through the destruction of property used in carrying out that conflict. Despite a warning sent to university officials, the bomb’s explosion killed one person and seriously injured at least three others, undermining antiwar activism on campus, setting off an international search for those responsible, and leaving a decades-long mark on the Madison campus and community.

Although the basic outline of the bombing is familiar to historians of the antiwar protest movements of the 1960s, it has received a new dramatic treatment in Uncivil Disobedience, a work of “oral history theater” written by Mike Lawler in collaboration with the Wisconsin Story Program, Madison’s Forward Theater Company, and the UW-Madison Oral History Project. The play opened in 2012, but the performance on which this review was based took place in Madison at the 2014 annual meeting of the Oral History Association. It is an innovative work of history and theater that demonstrates the ways in which scholars and artists can collaborate to create historically grounded and engaging works of art.

The 2014 performance in Madison consisted of ten actors all dressed in black in front of a black background. From the perspective of this reviewer, all of the actors appeared to be white, and they included nine men and one woman. When speaking, actors stood, either individually or in groups, often appearing to read from podiums in front of them. Most actors portrayed multiple characters (including activists engaged in the bombing and members of their families, bomb victims and their families, other former students and activists, former university professors, and court officials). All the spoken material came from oral history interviews or other historical documents (especially court proceedings and news reports). The interviews and documents in question ranged widely in point of origin, from immediately after the event to as late as 2011. As each actor rose to speak, information identifying his or her character or the source from which he or she spoke was projected onto a screen above the actors’ heads. Great care appears to have been taken to render the sources verbatim, with actors often using false starts, pauses, and other conventions of speech to great dramatic effect.

The problem at the heart of the play is the moral tension between antiwar activists’ seeming lack of options in the face of intransigent US military policy, on the one hand, and the costs of violence, whether directed by states or individuals, on both perpetrator and victim. As oral historians of particular events (especially those involving violence or trauma) have long understood, the perspective of life histories can be a powerful tool for linking peoples’ actions and understandings to deep historical context as well as for revealing the ways that events shape peoples’ later actions and memories. Drawing on this disciplinary perspective, Lawler and his collaborators reach back to activists’ formative experiences—from the moral legacy of the Holocaust to police brutality during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and subsequent protests in Madison—to provide context for their evolving sense of rage and political impotence. But the play’s authors also move forward in time, demonstrating the ways in which some people viewed the casualties as regrettable but justifiable in context while others repudiated them. The play brings home this tension through a focus on Karleton Lewis Armstrong, a key leader of the activists involved in the bombing, who expressed great remorse for the death of Robert Fassnacht, a physics researcher who was killed in the blast, but also (at least in the years immediately following the event) maintained a sense that he could have been acquitted of the crime of second degree murder (to which...