Two-headed organizing—for the stage

When the curtain goes up on Organizing Abraham Lincoln this July, union activists may recognize some familiar characters on stage. That’s because one of our own helped write the script.

Rich Klimmer marked 25 years in the AFT before retiring as a national representative in January. Klimmer and longtime friend Lonnie Carter, a playwright, recently won the Playwrights’ Center/Guthrie Theater Two-headed Challenge, and will present their collaborative play at the PlayLabs Festival in Minneapolis this July. Chosen from among 100 submissions from playwrights working with people outside the world of theater, the idea garnered a $6,000 cash prize and a slot at the festival. “The winning proposal evidenced … the depth of passion [the collaborators] have for the subject matter,” says Polly Carl, producing artistic director and contest curator at the Playwrights’ Center. Judges like their “joint capacity to tap into the Zeitgeist of college campuses. There are a lot of different dynamics worth mining.”

Among them: memorable characters. Like the graduate film worker who secretly lived in the film lab because she couldn’t afford an apartment. Or the African-American man who rapped at rallies. And there’s Klimmer himself, depicted with recognizable touchstones that will resonate among those who know him: ex-jock, Catholic upbringing, approaching retirement.

The play is fiction, but its impetus is Klimmer’s experience with the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association (TUGSA). Without the restriction of historical accuracy, it explores larger issues like “what ‘hire’ ed really is,” says Carter. “Do corporate interests run the university or do intellectuals? Or can there be some sort of amalgam of the two?”

In addition to his nationally recognized playwriting, Carter has been an adjunct at New York University for 24 years, and privy to stories about Klimmer’s union work since it began. The two met in 1961, roomed together at Marquette University and have kept in touch ever since.

Both men hope their play will dispel popular myths about unions. “A lot of people hear the term ‘union’ and their only reference is Jimmy Hoffa,” says Klimmer. “They’re going to see a picture of people who are just like themselves forming a union for the reasons people have always formed unions: to have dignity on their job and earn a living wage.” They’ll also learn that unions are not all blue-collar, he says—one-third of AFL-CIO members have college degrees, and an increasing number of graduate workers are organizing.

Finally, the myth of the savior is denied. Rather than focus on one hero, as so many labor films do, Organizing Abraham Lincoln (named for the fictional Abraham Lincoln University) will show the collective power of workers.

“Unions don’t organize workers,” says Klimmer. “Workers organize unions.… Our goal is that while the organizer be prominent in the beginning, he’ll be invisible by the end.”