[Peace-discuss] Gerry Levy of Marx in Soho

[Brussel Morton K.]

If you saw the play and are interested in Gerry Levy, here is an  
engaging interview.



Marx in Soho at the Athabasca Fringe 2005: An Interview with Actor  
and Sociologist Gerry Levy
Interview by Mike Gismondi

Aurora:  Gerry, we will get to Zinn and the play in a minute,  but  
first can you tell us a little about yourself ? Where do you live,  
and how you come to be traveling the world with this particular play?

Gerry Levy:  I live in Brattleboro, Vermont. I've lived there since  
1975. I started coming up there in 1970 with the commune movement. I  
grew up in Chicago, lived there for 17 years and went to the  
University of Illinois. I lived in Washington DC for a year, and then  
I lived in New York for 13 years, where I got my PhD in Sociology and  
started teaching.

In 1970, southern Vermont was one of the rural meccas that people  
were flocking towards. Not just the communards, but there was a kind  
of anti-urban movement that was responding to the tumultuousness of  
the '60s and '70s. It happened after the '68 Democratic convention.  
The assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby  
Kennedy, and the debacle at the Democratic convention. Protestors  
were beaten up in the streets, and inside the Democratic convention  
delegates were beaten up. The response to that was that you can't  
work within the system. The idea was to go to rural areas and start a  
new life and build a new society from the outside that would  
eventually take over the whole society. It didn't quite happen.

But anyway, I was a part of that. My marriage was breaking up. I was  
30, I was footloose and fancy free. I was teaching at Adelphi  
University. When I arrived there, 15 percent of the students were  
hippies and zippies and yippies and politicos. I was part of the  
first generation of new left faculty. This guy comes into my class,  
his name is Stein. He says, come on Gerry, I'm taking you to my  
commune. So he brought me up there, sold me his teepee and his  
Volkswagen. I was living in New York at the time, and I lived on this  
zippy hippy commune and fell in love with Vermont and started coming  
up. Eventually I left my job at Adelphi and moved up in '75 to start  
a new life in Vermont.

Aurora:  I understand that you went from the commune to the sociology  
department? What was that transition like?

Gerry Levy:  When I got up there, a couple of friends of mine were  
teaching at Marlboro College. So they got me a course. Eventually  
that led to a fourth time position, then a half time position that  
had to be renewed every year. I finally got a full time tenured  
position after 11 years, in '86. But when I first started coming up  
there, I only wanted to teach part time. I was going through some  
kind of 30 year old crisis, did I really want to be an academic? I'd  
been studying the violin seriously, and I was interested in the  
commune movement. So I moved up there and started doing community  
theatre. Since I wasn't responsible for anybody but myself, I did -  
at the age of 30 - what the previous generation did when they were in  
their early 20s. I didn't go on the road. I came to Vermont and  
started living out this rural life.

This was part of a major urban to rural migration, not just of youth,  
but of people of all ages. People were dropping out of corporations,  
and professionals were moving up because they wanted to have this  
more simple rural life. So I started doing a variety of things, and I  
stayed.

Aurora:  You were telling me the other day that over the years the  
mix of people in the community changed quite a bit.

Gerry Levy:  There was this major urban to rural migration. In some  
ways I would call it a new middle class migration, but there were  
working class people. There were propertied people moving up from  
Kentucky. There was a whole migration of people wanting to get away  
from urban areas which were filled with crime, trying to get away  
from the system that was promulgating the Vietnam War. It was a kind  
of the "cities on the hill" thing. You can start a new life. You can  
overthrow your previous life and replace it with some idealized life.  
So people came up. They wanted to farm, they wanted to engage in art  
outside of the system, they wanted alternative politics, they wanted  
good food, they wanted fresh air, they wanted a place to bring up  
their children. People wanted a place where they could experiment  
erotically, experiment with alternative education, different ways of  
bringing up your children. The Vermonters were very tolerant of this,  
because they had a history of utopian communities. The Oneida  
Community started there, where they had a system of complex  
sexuality, a system of multiple marriage (See the Oneida Community- 
http://www.nyhistory.com/central/oneida.htm). John Noyes had about 50  
wives. He could control his ejaculations, that was his thing. Then  
there were all the men down low on the totem pole who couldn't. He  
was like this authoritarian figure who determined who was ready to  
have sex with whom. Eventually Noyes was thrown out of Vermont. But  
there was this tradition, so they welcomed the hippies.

  A lot of educated middle class people moved to Vermont to live out  
their values and their ideology that they had picked up in the  
university, in the civil rights movement, in the women's movement, in  
the anti-Vietnam War movement, the environmental movement. Here was a  
place of a small enough scale where you could live that kind of life.  
That's what was driving them, and then there was also this ideology  
that we're going to withdraw. Hopelessly nave, but everybody bought  
it. We're going to withdraw from this society, and we're going to  
build our new society based on barter and ecological principles and  
growing your own food, building your own houses, creating your own  
culture and your art. We're going to withdraw from this, and  
eventually the old society will collapse because everyone will  
withdraw from it.


Well of course that didn't happen. What happened was the middle class  
people left the system, and the working class people were anxious to  
get into it and fill the spaces. Peter Berger once wrote an article  
called "The Bluing of America". As people withdraw from the system,  
that just creates opportunities for people who want to get in, in the  
corporate, bureaucratic, corrupt world. But that's what our  
legitimating ideology was at the time. I was part of that. My  
personal thing was that I had been teaching in New York and going on  
demonstrations and active in the anti-war movement. I was very  
frustrated, like everybody else, because the war seemed to go on and  
on and on. I was floundering in my life. I wanted to go to a place  
where I could really do something. And it worked for me. I found a  
place where, if you contributed anything to the culture, you were  
appreciated. What's the point of doing a play or giving a recital in  
New York? You're competing with the best people in the world. But in  
Brattleboro, anything you did was of some benefit to somebody. So I  
think that's what motivated me to go there, and I think that's what  
kept me there. I found a niche in life where I could teach, I could  
do some theatre, do some music, do some politics.

Aurora:  Not just some politics. Tell me a bit about your public life  
in state politics.

Gerry Levy:  I joined the Liberty Union Party, which was a kind of  
Socialist Anarchist party, like the Peace and Freedom Party and other  
small parties that were founded as a result of the Vietnam War. I  
joined the party. I'd been teaching US foreign policy, so instead of  
running for state legislature, (which I probably should have, though  
I didn't really even know enough to run for state legislature, I'd  
been there for three years), now I was going to run for the US  
Senate. So I did, and made quite a splash. New face on the block, got  
a lot of publicity, went around the state and got one percent of the  
vote. I did it again and again and again. One percent of the vote,  
seven or eight times. When there wasn't a US Senate race, I would run  
for Secretary of State. Some critics tried to increase the vote  
required for small parties to run candidates, so that instead of  
having to get five percent, they were going to make it 10 percent in  
a statewide race, to get rid of these liberal union people and the  
grassroots people (there were a bunch of little political parties).  
So, then I ran for Secretary of State, with the agenda of getting 10  
percent of the vote. I got six percent of the vote, didn't get close.  
Since then I've been active in local activist issues -- nuclear power  
plant protests, stuff like that.

Aurora:  You said to me this morning that you actually found that the  
Zinn play offered you a new chance to work towards more effective  
changes.

Gerry Levy:  You really never know the results of your actions. As a  
teacher, as an activist and environmentalist, you never know what you  
contribute to social change. You hope. You act, and you hope. But  
I've found that as a result of doing this play -- I've performed it  
27 times now on the east coast, west coast, and now Canada that  
people are very interested in Howard Zinn's "Marx in Soho".  For you  
Canadians who don't know him, Howard Zinn is this famous American  
activist and scholar, who in 1980 wrote A People's History of the  
United States. It's a best selling

book, it's sold probably millions of copies. Everywhere you go, (and  
I would call them lovers of Howard Zinn) his followers come out. If  
he's giving a lecture they'll come out - 500, or a 1,000 people. If  
they're showing his documentary, they come. They just love him and  
love everything he touches. He's like a grandfather figure in  
American politics. If we had a social movement of any consequence, he  
would be one of the leaders, and he is one of the leaders, and would  
be an elder statesman. If he was a little younger he'd be,  
well...he's kind of a Martin Luther King type. He's that resonant on  
so many levels.

Anyway, I read his play "Marx in Soho", which is a play about Karl  
Marx coming back after being dead for 100 years. He's pissed off  
because it's the fall of the Soviet Union and they've declared that  
not only is he dead, but his ideas are dead forever. Communism is  
dead, the nails are in the coffin. He comes back and he's living in  
this other worldly place for controversial political, religious, and  
artistic leaders. He says, I want to go back, I'm so misrepresented.  
Well the committee in the afterworld allows him to go back. Marx grew  
up in Soho, in London, England but through a bureaucratic mistake, he  
ends up in Soho, New York. There's this audience, and he's telling  
them about his life and his ideas and his relationship with his  
family, and his views, everything he's seen in the last 100 years. He  
saying, my ideas are still relevant, capitalism is doomed. But, in  
this play, its a more mellow, easygoing, sensitive, likeable Marx.

Zinn portrays him this way, so I'm trying to represent Zinn's  
representation of Marx, which I live.

  I think Marx is an important historical figure. I think he's worth  
bringing up and looking at every once in a while during these  
terrible times in the United States, in the belly of the beast, the  
evil empire destroying the rest of the world. We activists in the  
United States are very frightened, very frustrated, and very angry,  
and feeling very impotent at the same time, with the Bush  
administration. So Zinns play is complex, well thought-out and  
realistic; a feel-good play for activists, for people who want to  
know a little bit about Marx, for people who maybe just want a kind  
of secular quasi-religious ceremony they can gather around. And for  
people who've never been exposed to Marx, I think its a very good  
introduction.

Aurora:  You told me that youve really found an audience, one  that  
you had not expected and that on this tour youve been invited by  
community groups and communities across the west

Gerry Levy:  I have my man, my outreach coordinator, who's emailing.  
I'm computer illiterate. But he's emailing me and finding venues for  
me. I've just been to Portland and now the Athabasca Fringe Festival,  
a wonderful festival that you all should go to. And wonderful for the  
performers, because they're treated so well. Then I'm going other  
places on the West Coast, peace groups, socialist groups, a Marxist  
school in Sacramento. It'll be interesting to find out what they're  
all about, they got me down for four nights. I'm on sabbatical, so I  
have nine months to tour this play to death.  I hope to go Europe  
with it too. I view it on a number of levels: to perform the play, to  
meet people, to have them tell me about their lives and their  
situations. I'm interested in political economy, I'm interested in  
how globalization is affecting a particular town, a particular rural  
area, a particular region. I'm interested in how different classes  
and status groups are making out economically and socially and  
culturally, in the niche that they're trying to find in this global  
political age.

So now, I'm in a farming community in the wilds of Alberta. It's  
wild. My friend Mike is a sociologist, and he's showing me around. In  
a sense I'm doing fieldwork too, trying to find out more. But like  
all good fieldworkers, I'm willing to talk about myself and what I know.

Aurora:  We had a realization the other day that we both are  
professors teaching in very small communities. Athabasca is 2,500,  
it's a bit bigger where you are. Could we talk some more about being  
an academic in a rural small town?

Gerry Levy:  In Brattleboro where I teach at Marlboro College, the  
college is one of dozens of alternative institutions that were  
started after World War II, but particularly in the '60s and '70s and  
'80s that accompanied this rural migration. There are solar  
institutes, there's a school for international training, there's  
Landmark College, which is a school for dyslexics, there's everyone's  
institute fantasy. There's writers' workshops, there's music  
festivals. Brattleboro and the surrounding area is invested with  
alternative institutions that have been started by migrants from  
urban areas, who basically have created in institutional form the  
fantasies of what they wanted to do. Just like when they build their  
dream house in the outlying town, they either buy up an old house and  
fix it up, or they build a new house which is their environmental  
dream. Brattleboro culture is many-faceted. It's new age, it's  
leftist, it's progressive, it's artistic, it's feminist. It's all of  
the ideologies and directions which the '60s and '70s went in  
American society. The broad scale revolt against western civilization  
in the United States has congealed in Brattleboro. So there's radical  
bookstores, there's coffee shops, there's theatres, there's a dance  
center. Everything that an urban person would want. So it's very  
attractive to artists, professors, intellectuals. People are flocking  
there. The difficulty for them is making a living because for every  
job for a professor, there are 20 professors or retiring professors  
that would love to work here. When we do a search, say at Marlboro  
College for a new professor, 300 people apply. I know, because I've  
been on some of these search committees. Then we pared it down to 20  
people, and then three or four finalists. Each of them comes for a  
day, we run them through the mill, and we make a decision. From our  
point of view, we should be getting the crme de la crme. We get very  
good people. But think of all those people who don't get jobs. Some  
people move there anyway and they can't get jobs, so they commute to  
other places or find other things to do. This is true in  
psychotherapy, it's true in alternative medicine, regular medicine:  
there are three times the number of people trying to sell their  
services in a limited market. So it's like everybody's trying to  
start their little business, their little sheep farm, their cheese  
farm, their organic farm, their this, their that, everything under  
the sun. There's almost too much culture, too much production with  
not enough consumption.

With regard to the college, people are willing to come there at a  
very low salary. Our incoming salary is $36,000, maybe a little more.  
The spread between the incoming salary and the highest salary is  
maybe $12,000 or $15,000. So the senior faculty get a job here, you  
can't get a job anywhere else. To get a job somewhere else you have  
to be a distinguished professor who's published an important book.  
Marlboro rewards teaching, not publishing. You don't have to publish  
anything to get tenure at Marlboro College. So from the point of view  
of getting a job somewhere else, you're kind of stuck there. And they  
know they've got you forever, so they're not going to raise your  
salary. Also, it's a small college that's struggling to survive. So  
they raise the base pay, but they don't raise the upper pay. The  
senior professors, the tenured ones, (and there's no rank you're  
either junior or senior faculty, and when you're senior faculty  
you're tenured), you're kind of stuck there. But the younger people  
will come because it's a good place to raise families. It's very  
attractive, because there's really interesting schools and all sorts  
of interesting stuff going on.

Aurora:  You don't sound stuck there, Gerry.

Gerry Levy:  No, I'm not complaining. I've had a wonderful run.

Aurora:  Can I ask you about your music? You've been shy about it,  
but you're a musician.

Gerry Levy:  I was for many years a very serious amateur violinist. I  
probably would say that music is my first love. Growing up, I decided  
not to be a musician, because I wasn't good enough. In those days,  
Jewish boy growing up in a secular Jewish family, the way you make  
your way in the world is you are the best at what you do. I knew I  
wasn't going to be the best, so I went another direction. But this  
need to play music didn't go away. So I started again studying the  
violin when I was 30, and got better and better to the point where I  
was a pretty good amateur and maybe a semi-professional with a  
special talent. So I started playing chamber music up there again. I  
gave some recitals and performed chamber music. Being a musician is  
like being an athlete. You have to be able to sustain it. For my 60th  
birthday, this wonderful pianist, Louis Poitier, who's an assistant  
to Rudolph Serkin, asked me if I had stopped playing because I had  
some physical problem. He said, when are you going to start playing  
again? Well, I said, I'm going to play this year, and I'm going to  
perform all of the Mozart violin piano sonatas. The next day he  
called and said he would perform them with me. So I practiced and  
practiced and practiced. I performed many of them. And we started  
giving them. The first recital, I had to stop. I didn't have the  
staying power. So that was a big crisis. I said, I'm going to stop  
until my body loosens up. Then I just stopped. I threw it all into  
theatre. I'm going to take up the violin again, but not working  
towards performance. I've been doing theatre. When I came up to  
Brattleboro in the '70s I started doing community theatre. I've been  
acting for 35 years, and I've had really good roles. Now I'm focusing  
on theatre, but I love music. Any time I can find a live classical  
concert, I go.

Aurora:  So how did you find this play by Zinn?

Gerry Levy:  These friends of mine, Stan and Barbara Charkey, he's a  
music professor at Marlboro College, and we're very close friends. We  
eat dinner together once or twice a week. They had read this play and  
they said, Oh Gerry, you've got to read this play. This is perfect  
for you. An actor is always looking for a good part. I read the play  
and that was it. It seemed to express everything I felt about Marx  
and the current context of society.

Zinn and Eric Fromm are very generous when they deal with Marx,  
especially Fromm. Eric Fromm can say nothing bad against Marx. Zinn's  
portrait is a very generous one, but also I wouldn't call it a  
whitewash. He does portray some of his less attractive qualities, I  
hope. And I felt that I have the physical type, I've taught Marx for  
most of my adult life, I thought the play was well written, and for  
some reason I knew I could do it. So, I wrote Zinn a long letter,  
raving about the play, how I thought it was so important at this  
time. I wanted to bring this play to a larger audience. I started  
telling him about myself. He wrote back a short note saying, thank  
you for your kind words. Perhaps you could send me a video before I  
allow you to do it locally. I could understand that. He's not out to  
make money with this play. He wants his ideas to be represented  
responsibly. Not just anyone can memorize forty-nine pages of text,  
and pull it off. I respect that very much. So I did the video, and he  
liked it.

I've been doing it for about a year now. He and his wife, Roz came to  
see it. There's a wonderful documentary about his life, based on a  
book he wrote, You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train. If you're  
interested in Howard Zinn, you should read it. This documentary is  
like that. So I saw her on the documentary. When they came to  
Brandeis University to see the play, I went up to her and said, I met  
you on the documentary. They both liked the play very much. It was a  
thrill to do it for them. It gave me a special energy. I'd like to  
think it was a good performance. They liked it. The fact that they  
like it is very important. Whatever my limitations as an actor, I  
feel their support and acceptance, which is very important to me.

Aurora:  You mentioned that you had taken the play outside the States  
once before coming to Canada, and that was to the Dominican Republic.

Gerry Levy:  I did. I have a former student, a woman who studied with  
me and then studied with Arthur Vidich at the New School for Social  
Research. She went down to Santo Domingo and started a small  
foundation which provides services to the rural poor outside Santo  
Domingo. Families who have lost their land and are either working in  
the new textile sweatshops, are unemployed, or are prostitutes or are  
going to Santo Domingo trying to get something. The poorest  
communities. She goes to the schools there, she brings artists there,  
she provides crafts, art, helps with the soup kitchens so they can  
get a good meal. She's doing whatever a social worker can do in a  
situation like that. She invited me down, and she has contacts with  
the activists, the youth, the artists, intellectuals. She invited me  
down to give a couple of performances of "Marx in Soho", and maybe  
give some talks on US foreign policy, which I love to do. In all my  
years as a candidate for the United States Senate, and teaching US  
foreign policy, nobody ever invited me, even in Vermont where I'm  
known, to give a talk on US foreign policy, which is one of my  
specialties. So I was able to give a couple of talks on US foreign  
policy at local universities in Santo Domingo to large audiences.  
They are very interested in what somebody from the belly of the beast  
has to say. So I gave performances, I gave some lectures, I gave some  
workshops. It was wonderful, about the same as my experience here in  
Athabasca. Just wonderful.


Mike Gismondi is Director, Master of Arts, Integrated Studies  
(graduate program) at Athabasca University.
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