In a windowless room beneath fluorescent lights, a young Black actor rehearses a scene, freestyling near a downtown L station: “FBI coming ‘round the outside. Which one of us finna die tonight?”
The police arrive, order the young man to get on his knees.
“Hands where we can see them!” one officer yells.
Let the mind wander beyond the walls of the Goodman Theatre’s practice space and it’s not hard to imagine the echo of National Guard boots on the streets outside. It’s early September, and President Donald Trump has been threatening to flood city streets with federal troops — a plan his administration will set in motion a few weeks later.
Off to one side of the rehearsal room, South Loop playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn sits with the script open, his fingers fidgeting against the rim of a coffee cup as he watches the actors.
Later, he says, “It’s quite shocking, interesting, sometimes disturbing, to see how many of those echoes are now with us in a different way — a second Trump Administration, which I never would have anticipated, and more questions of police and military deployment in the streets of Chicago. All of the things I was writing about then seem to be true again now.”
Five years ago, Dohrn began writing a new play called “Revolution(s),” which he set in 1989 and 2014, the year that police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparking an uprising. The play opens Oct. 4.
Theatergoers will surely hear the present-day echoes, and many will likely pick up on more distant echoes — from Dohrn’s early childhood, when his parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Rae Dohrn, helped found the Weather Underground, a Marxist group that sought to overthrow the U.S. government.
Dohrn spent several years on the run with his parents. Bernardine Dohrn was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for a time; she surrendered to police in Chicago in 1980. Charges against Ayers had previously been dropped after a judge ruled the evidence against him was obtained illegally.
Both parents would go on to long academic careers — Ayers as a professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago, Dohrn as a law professor at Northwestern University.
Dohrn says “Revolution(s),” his first musical and a collaboration with Tom Morello of Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine fame, has perhaps the most direct connection to his parents’ activities, although it’s not specifically about them or his family.
“I didn’t notice until I’d written four or five plays that they all seemed to be about families that were in some way struggling to reconcile different competing ideological agendas,” says Dohrn, who also teaches playwriting at Northwestern. “And children trying to understand the legacy they were left by complicated and morally ambiguous parents.”
“I wouldn’t have said this is what I’m trying to write,” he adds. “It maybe just bubbled up in a way — unconscious preoccupations.”
And no, not after years of therapy.
“I’ve never been to therapy. Playwriting is my therapy,” he says.
The play follows a Black soldier, Hampton Falk-Weems, who returns from Afghanistan to find that his South Side community is now occupied territory. Hampton, an aspiring musician, is accidentally swept up in the resistance movement. It’s also a love story — actually three love stories.
“And how love is a very revolutionary act,” Dohrn says.
The audience will recognize the Chicago presented in the show. And the voices too: About half the cast of 13 actors is from Chicago, the other half currently or recently on Broadway.
It’s a musical, but not in the traditional sense, Dohrn says.
“Most of the music in this play comes out of the fact that the characters are themselves musicians and they are putting on a concert,” he says. “There’s a story woven through it, but a lot of times, they are playing a song because the characters are communicating … by saying, ‘Let me play you this song,’ or because they’re sitting in a janitor’s closet after work, playing music together.”
Put another way, “it’s kind of an anti-musical,” Dohrn says.
Dohrn, who grew up in Hyde Park, and Morello, raised in Libertyville, weren’t close friends before Dohrn started writing the play. But Morello was friends with Dohrn’s parents.
“We knew each other enough that I had his phone number and I could text him during the pandemic and say, ‘I’ve been listening to a lot of your music a lot and it’s really resonating with me at this particular moment,’” Dohrn recalls. “I wrote the script, sent it to him, and he was very enthusiastic.”
Earlier this year, Morello told WBEZ, “One of my principal concerns going in was that the North Star of my writing, from Rage Against the Machine to the present, was to have something that was very uncompromising and unapologetic. I’m like, ‘Can we do that same thing in the theater?’”
He said he didn’t want a musical theater version of his song catalog: “There’s some other jukebox musicals of that sort — we weren’t interested in doing anything like that.”
Theatergoers will hear new songs and recognize music from Morello’s 22-album, three-decade career.
“It’s kind of a mix tape of his amazing catalog, as well as some brand new unheard stuff,” Dohrn says.
The show is being staged in Goodman’s Owen Theatre, which has about half the capacity of the mainstage.
“We wanted it, we asked for it,” Dohrn says. “The play is set in a Chicago warehouse where the people are having a sort of underground rave, a protest concert. We wanted a space that could represent that kind of punk, rock ’n’ roll edge that Tom’s music has and that the play tries to embody.”
Or as the show’s director, Steve H. Broadnax III, says: “We wanted that raw, industrial, almost illegal feel to it more than pristine theatrical.”
Dohrn has said in interviews that while his politics lean left, he does not think, like his mother in her Weather Underground days, in “moral absolutes.”
“That’s why I became a writer instead of an activist, because I’m interested in the messiness that drives people,” he says in “Mother Country Radicals,” an award-winning podcast about his parents’ time with the Weather Underground.
Dohrn says there are “crazy voices” on either side of the political spectrum and describes himself as a “free speech absolutist.”
“I do think there was an unhealthy trend on the left and on college campuses towards shouting down people with whom certain highly motivated activists disagreed,” he says. “I don’t think that was healthy for intellectual debate or artistic creation.”
Does he think there is a place in modern society for a revolutionary and what would one look like?
All shapes and forms, he says.
“Tom Morello is a modern revolutionary,” he adds.
“Revolutions(s)” runs through Nov. 9 at the Goodman. Six days later, the Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol” starts on the mainstage.
Dohrn says he’s hoping audiences buying tickets for the classic Charles Dickens story will also think about coming to his show.
“I love ‘A Christmas Carol.’ It’s actually quite a radical story if you stop to think about it,” he says — for him, an “anti-capitalist, anti-greed fable.”