Jimmy Higgins
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Jimmy Higgins
| April 28 at the St. Lawrence, in Portland | May 30 at the Meg Perry Center, in Portland | June 6-7 at the Theatre Project, in Brunswick | June 13 at Acorn Studio in the Dana Warp Mill, in Westbrook
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The changes 21st-century presidential candidates talk about are modest in comparison with the radical leftist politics of the first half of the last century. An original new one-man show, Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement, celebrates the activist energy of that time. Written and performed by Harlan Baker, it premieres at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center on April 28, and corresponds with Workers Memorial Day.
Baker’s work weaves the fictional reporter and labor activist Jimmy Higgins (the name, Baker says, has long been a sort of Everyman moniker for the rank-and-file labor activist) through the major moments in radical and labor politics during the early 20th century. Higgins tells of his encounters with Eugene Debs and others opposed to American involvement in the first World War, with the 1924 presidential campaign of the Progressive Party’s Robert LaFollette (who went on to win 17 percent of the popular vote, unprecedented for a third-party candidate), and with covering the 1930s union-organizing drives of tenant farmers and auto workers.
We hear of his experiences on the eve of the 1960 election, as Higgins, now an aged man, narrates his life to a college newspaper reporter. Intertwined with his political formation is the story of Higgins’s personal development, from selling his dad’s lefty newspaper as a boy, to meeting his future wife in the movement. Baker’s play deftly weds the personal and political, and history looks like what it is — the gathered threads of human lives.
Venerable local actor and director Baker has been theatrically involved in these parts for decades (and will portray Shylock in Naked Shakespeare’s upcoming Merchant of Venice). He is also a teacher, union activist, former state legislator, and democratic socialist leader, and his new play synthesizes many of these affinities. Jimmy Higgins celebrates a life of engagement for the common good, and an energy for change that our times, too, could certainly stand to rouse.