Boston Crackdown Follows Derber's Occupy Play

Program art for the play courtesy of a local artist named Rick.

Dewey Square -- After a riveting hour-long performance of Boston College sociology professor Charles Derber's new play, "You're Fired: What the 1% Have Planned for the 99%," Boston mayor Thomas Menino ordered all Occupy Boston protesters to get out of their camp. By midnight on Thursday, police had removed all the tents and arrested dozens.

The play, which was co-written by UMass Dartmouth professor Yale Magrass, explored a hypothetical future world where the 1% wages a genocidal campaign against "surplus populations" in a storyline that might make Thomas Malthus cringe. Students from Deber's American Economic Crisis and Social Change course donned unlikely costumes in a show featuring British accents and the ghost of C. Wright Mills.

"What we were trying to do in the play is highlight several of the important political goals of the movement,' Derber explained. "But I have to say my favorite part was wearing an Abraham Lincoln top hat and reading passages from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon."

Despite mayor Menino's dinner plans that evening, which prevented his attendance at the show, he sent along several staffers to report back on its themes. They ultimately deemed the play "poorly scripted" and "the nadir of the American Left," while also being "remarkably well-casted and attended."

In an interview with The Register, Menino expressed his frustration with the Occupy movement.

"Just when you think they were beginning to practically articulate political demands, they go and do something like this," he said, referring to Derber's play.

"Somewhere Arthur Miller is rolling over in his grave," he concluded.

Professor Charles Derber wrote and produced the play and starred as The Ghost of Karl Marx.