- Barbara Garson
Barbara Garson (born
July 7 ,1941 inBrooklyn ,New York City ) is an Americanplaywright ,author andsocial activist .Garson is best known for the play "
MacBird ", a notorious 1966counterculture drama /political parody of "MacBeth " that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide. The play was originally intended for ananti-war teach-in at theUniversity of California, Berkeley . The first published edition was printed on an offset press that Garson had restored the year before in order to print "The Free Speech Movement Newsletter " which she edited. She was one of 800 arrested withMario Savio during these early student protests of the 1960s. Garson's self-published edition of "MacBird" had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play opened in New York in a production starringStacey Keach , Bill Devane,Cleavon Little andRue McClanahan . While these then unknown actors went on to become fixtures in American theater, movies andtelevision , the author disappeared from public view at the height of fame.In 1968 Garson had a child and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI Coffee House near
Fort Lewis Army base inTacoma, Washington . Her only known publications from the coffee house period were articles in aSeattle anarchist newsletter and contributions to "FTA", the Jane Fonda anti-war show for soldiers that toured G.I. venues in the U.S. and abroad. She is said to have written skits performed at the coffee house during her tenure there.Garson moved to
Manhattan in the early 1970s and began publishing short, humorousessays and theater reviews primarily for "The Village Voice ". Her next full length play "Going Co-op ", 1972, was a comedy about residents of an Upper West-Side Manhattan apartment house going co-op and a flounderingleft wing political collective that comes home to help organize the tenants who can't afford to buy. It was written with Fred Gardner. Gardner is credited with founding the first of the Vietnam era GI Coffee Houses.Garson's children's play "
The Dinosaur Door " set on a class trip to the Natural History Museum, was awarded an OBIE for playwriting in 1977.A full length play, "The Department" 1983 written for and performed by the organizing group Women Office Workers (WOW) is set in a bank's back office that is about to be automated. "The Department", though a light farce, sets out many of the problems that Garson expanded on in her 1989 book "The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past".
In addition to plays Barbara Garson is the author of three non-fiction books:
* "All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work", Doubleday & Co., N.Y., 1975; Penguin, N.Y., 1977,; Expanded edition, Penguin, 1994.
* "The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past", Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1988; Penguin, N.Y., 1989.
* "Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy", Viking, N.Y., 2001, Penguin, N.Y., 2002.All three books explain complex capitalist phenomena — Taylorism in the first two, global finance in the third — through dramatic anecdotes and interviews. They each describe a historical turning point through the voices of a range of people who may or may not, themselves, understand the changes happening in their own lives. "MacBird" is remembered as an attack on then U.S. President
Lyndon Johnson . In fact, it presented Johnson's predecessor, John Kennedy, and his would-be successor Robert Kennedy as equally unacceptable but more dangerously alluring. Garson wanted her fellow 1960s activists to step away from the Democratic Party and create their own institutions including a third party. To that end she could sometimes be seen outside of California theaters where "MacBird" was playing, gathering signatures to put thePeace and Freedom Party on the ballot. In "Money Makes the World Go Around" Garson explained the global economy by depositing her book advance in a one branch small town bank, then following it around the world. At one point her money was invested in Suez, the French company that ownedJohannesburg 's water system. When protesters were arrested for opposing price increases and water shut offs, Garson organized a "shareholders" demonstration on their behalf in front of the South African consulate.Garson insists that activism is essential to her writing. But her plays and non-fiction feature layered characters and plot twists that are often irrelevant or even inimical to liberal and
socialist tenets. Indeed, "Money Makes the World Go Around" was largely ignored by the anti-globalization movement within which Garson was active, while a "Wall Street Journal " review said "Ms. Garson recounts her travels with a disarmingly balanced combination of amazement and social concern"Fact|date=February 2007 and "Business Week " said "...her voice is so persistently good-natured and her intelligence so obvious that by the end of this curious capitalist'sBaedeker you can't help but trust her gentle judgments."Fact|date=February 2007Garson is the author of over 100 articles in publications including "
Harper's ", "The New York Times ", "McCalls ", "Newsweek ", "The Village Voice ", "Ms.", "The Washington Post ", "The Los Angeles Times ", "Newsday ", "Modern Maturity ", "Mother Jones", "The Nation ", and "Znet ".She was awarded an OBIE for "The Dinosaur Door" and a Special Commission from the New York State Council on the Arts, for the Creation of Plays for Younger audiences. She has received a
Guggenheim Fellowship , aNational Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation Grant, the N.Y. Public Library Books to Remember award and Library Journal's Best Business Books of 1989 award and aMacArthur Foundation Grant for reading and writing.In 1992, Garson was the running mate for
J. Quinn Brisben on theSocialist Party USA ticket, replacing Bill Edwards, who died during the race. In August 1992 she received a message on heranswering machine : "We're sorry to tell you that the Socialist Vice-Presidential candidate, Bill Edwards, has died. We would like your help in writing a press release for the newspapers. And also, would you like to run for Vice President?", which she initially believed to be a joke. [Kathleen Teltsch, "Chronicle" New York Times, August 28, 1992]ee also
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American literature References
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