Theater Provokes!
A collaboration between
Revolution Books and
New York Theater Workshop

During the 2011-2012 theater season, Revolution Books is partnering with the New York Theater Workshop to recommend a reading list for each of the four new plays produced at NYTW. RB and NYTW will also co-sponsor panel discussions in connection with FOOD AND FADWA (January 2012) and AN ILIAD (Spring 2012) on topics related to the plays' themes. These events will take place at Revolution Books and will feature theater artists, writers, and speakers from NYTW and RB. Revolution Books' reading lists will include books and DVD's which are revealing of the play's history and setting, along with companion works which illuminate the themes. The recommendations reflect RB's purpose as a place to find books and engagement about why the world is the way it is and how it could be radically changed. Some selections explore the deep-structural causes beneath the contradictions presented in the plays, others consider how people and the world could be different in a new revolutionary society. The books and DVD below are available at Revolution Books, 146 W. 26th Street, NY, NY. We can also mail them to you on request, but better to stop by the bookstore for a conversation and to look around. You will find a unique and exciting place-- a center of a movement for revolution.

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The first play, THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES) at New York Theater Workshop began previews on August 19; the play opens on September 11 and closes October 9, 2011. The play is "a fresh take on Ernest Hemingway's tale of young ex-patriots living in Europe after World War I. Journalist Jake Barnes, his former lover Lady Brett Ashley and the writer Robert Cohn inhabit Europe to cope with post-war realities and enter the Age of Anxiety following the end of the war." (NYTW)

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The play is loosely based on this novel about young ex-patriots, a "lost generation" living in Europe after World War I. Written in 1925. Scribner, paperback, $15.00

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild

World War I stands as history's first great imperialist world war, a war that also gave rise to the first communist revolution. In a riveting narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, historian Adam Hochschild focuses on Britain and the long-ignored moral drama of the war's brave critics up against the patriotic loyalists backed by the UK government's "xenophobic torrent" of pro-war propaganda. This was replicated by the other imperial powers-- a flood amounting to "the greatest political propaganda barrage history had seen." Washington Post: "Hochschild's depiction of life in the trenches is so vivid that some readers may have difficulty stomaching it…" The author is best known for "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" (1998) Published 2011, hardbound, 480-page, $28.00

Three Soldiers, by John dos Passos

Written about World War 1 in 1920, Three Soldiers broke new ground as the first realist war novel. The book follows 3 privates from different class backgrounds, reporting the process by which their patriotism dissolves. H.L. Mencken (one of the literary critics Hemingway references in "The Sun Also Rises") had this to say about Three Soldiers: "…At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."

The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, by Alexander Rabinowitch

This book gives some sense of the drama and colossal historical impact of this first-ever successful proletarian revolution. Emerging out of the first world war, the Soviet revolution opened the door to a new kind of society on the planet—one without the exploitation of the millions by a small capitalist class, and the whole dog-eat-dog ethos that flows from that. This absorbing history explores the changing situation and aspirations of the workers, soldiers, and sailors, and the role of Lenin's revolutionary party in leading them to seize power in October 1917 and establish an unprecedented new society. Written by a non-Marxist academic at University of Indiana. 1976, revised 2004 It's worth pondering the fact that Hemingway's characters, who had all recently lived through WW1 and were searching desperately for meaning in life, do not reference this earthshaking social experiment.

BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian

A book of quotations and short essays that speaks powerfully to questions of revolution and human emancipation. Avakian is the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Chapter 5, Quote #20: "The situation cannot be allowed to continue where the alternatives with major social impact within this society are self-indulgent individualism, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, religious fundamentalism and subordination and sacrifice of the self to the collective juggernaut of imperialist conquest and plunder, as for example in the U.S. military; and where, in one form or another, a culture and morality serving the interests of the most monstrous exploiters and oppressors—and a system which does indeed, without the slightest bit of exaggeration, crush lives and mangle spirits on a massive scale, throughout the world, while having the audacity to present itself as the best of all possible systems and a shining example for the world—has virtually unchallenged hegemony. "The point is that there is a real need and a real basis to be bringing forward, fighting for—and, yes, living, even now—a radically different philosophy and a radically different culture and morality. And besides the realms of culture and morality there is a need, as has been emphasized before, for a fierce battle in the ideological/epistemological realm, particularly against relativism and its pernicious effects. Again, we see now a situation that is too much like that described in the poem by William Butler Yeats: "The worst are full of passionate intensity"—and absolutist certainty, we might add—while 'the best lack all conviction.' This has to be radically taken on and radically changed." -- Bob Avakian, Basics (originally from "Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, but Human Beings Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, Part 2, 2011) Chapter 2, Quote #14: "So, yes, there must be in socialist society—and in communist society—a recognition of the importance of individual conscience, and of the right, and fundamentally of the need, for people to create various works of literature and art which embody and give life to different particular ways of 'coming at' reality (or a part of reality), different modes of 'individual expression.' There is an important role for that, and there must be a broad scope for that—both as something that's important in itself and also, in a deeper sense, as part of the overall process of coming to understand the world in increasingly richer ways and continuing to transform it in accordance with the largest interests of humanity. All this is part of the objective of advancing to—and then continuing to advance in—the radically new era of communism. But this is very different from—and will be much more fully expressed the more that it moves beyond— notions of individual conscience and individual creativity as private property—which inevitably means in conflict and competition with other embodiments of private property…" --Bob Avakian, BAsics (originally from "Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy")

Paths of Glory

(DVD film- 1957) is a masterful, unsentimental anti-war film about World War I. It was 28 year-old Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature-length film, and starred Kirk Douglas… An independent 87-minute black and white film, shot on location in Germany with a budget of less than $1 million, it is a harsh indictment of the first imperialist world war. The film exposes the gap between those who take orders and fight the wars in muddy trenches, and those who give the orders for the ruling powers and are kept safely shielded from the ravages of war.

The Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech by Eugene V. Debs

- June 16, 1918 Debs was founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party. This speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his arrest and conviction in 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was sentenced to 10 years. Debs: "…Socialists were not born yesterday. They know how to read capitalist newspapers; and to believe exactly the opposite of what they read. Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind…." Debs: "…Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims—they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight…" The full speech is available in "Writings of Eugene V. Debs" and also online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm

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UPCOMING PLAYS at New York Theater Workshop

After THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES), the New York Theater Workshop will be presenting:
2. ONCE (Fall 2011) On the streets of Dublin, an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant are drawn together by their shared love of music.
3. FOOD AND FADWA (Jan 2012) A play about an unmarried, 30-something Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem in the politically volatile West Bank in the West Bank.
4. AN ILIAD (Spring 2012) Visionary creators Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare have crafted a sprawling yarn based on Homer's epic poem.

Look for Revolution Books' readings lists and announcements of panel discussions on this page. To buy tickets for THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES), and to see descriptions of the 4 plays from the NYTW, go to http://nytw.org/season_10_11.asp