Shock theater! The first shock came while stepping into the Odyssey’s Theater 2, whose walls were smeared with political graffiti, floors strewn with filthy mattresses, clothes, books and jugs of Gallo red. The second shock came when the six actors on stage launched into an agit-prop play, Home/Sick. Agit-prop? It’s about as hard to encounter that kind of theater in L.A. as it is to encounter a goony bird. Thanks to The Assembly, a New York-based theater collective making a West Coast visit, we got a big, bracing dose of political theater as Home/Sick. unfolded on stage. Make that exploded. Loud, angry and impassioned, directed in a quick, slashing style, Home/Sick chronicles the rise and fall of the Weather Underground, the revolutionary movement of the 1960s and 70s. “The Assembly did extensive research into the memoirs, histories and documentary films about Weather Underground, as well as literature inspired by the movement. Months of improvisation, collective writing and theatrical experimentation followed, leading to a breadth of material devised by the cast and creative team,” the press notes explain. “Each member of the ensemble created a character based partially on an actual member (or members) of the Weather Underground, and partly on the actor’s own identity: his or her ambitions, anxieties and relationship to the rest of the group. After ten months of workshopping and rehearsing, the material was condensed and shaped into the arc of the revolutionary collective’s struggle, successes and failures to transform American politics and society. The final production incorporates live music, contact improv, audience participation, autobiographical material, a fully improvised scene, and the live creation of visual art – all in a tautly structured story carefully calibrated for maximum impact.” The Weather Underground members – they first met in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) movement – suffered from the delusion that they could lead the American people into an armed revolt against the government, a la Che and Fidel against Battista. But the USA wasn’t a banana republic, and the WU revolution failed miserably. But as Home/Sick shows so convincingly, the members were idealistic and romantic in their beliefs, fully committed to the struggle — at least at the start. “Let’s fuck shit up,” one of them shouts at a meeting, and that’s just what they do for some ten years, protesting against the Viet Nam war, racism and imperialism by ever-increasing acts of violence. Powered by wine, grass, communal sex, and savagely honest confrontations with each other, the cadre took on the military/industrial complex as best it could, trying to partner with the Black Panthers (only to be rebuffed), bomb government buildings, rob armored cars, issue manifestos. It all led to naught: one of their home-made bombs exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three members of the Weathermen. The FBI infiltrated the movement, resulting in internecine strife, disillusion, and jail terms. Some of the Weathermen went into hiding and took on new identities even as they secretly tried to hold on to their values and principles. The Assembly team pulls out all the stops in telling this wild, mad, messy, rock ‘n role tale. It is to be congratulated for its courage, skill and commitment.
