Gagarin Way
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Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way debuted at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and quickly spread to stages across the globe; it’s now been translated into 19 languages. The title comes from an actual street in western Fife in Scotland named for the first cosmonaut in space. Soviet heroes may seem unlikely honorees in the British Isles, but the once thriving west Fife, now a post-Thatcher industrial wasteland, has traditionally been a hotbed of communism, returning communist party members to Parliament until 1951. The admitted product of a radical leftist environment, Burke claims he intended this play, his first, to be about “economics . . . the source of real power in our increasingly globalised times . . . and about men and our infinite capacity for self-delusion.”
The plot revolves around poorly paid drones in a multinational computer company who hope that murdering a highly placed executive will inaugurate worldwide labor unrest. Eddie is an overeducated nihilist, comfortable dissecting Sartre and Genet but happy only when he’s being a hooligan and causing trouble. Gary is an idealistic socialist embittered by the disappearance of antimanagement collective action. When they team up to commit political murder, it’s an experiment to Eddie and propaganda to Gary. The two of them lure an unsuspecting security guard, university student Tom, into their plot and kidnap middle-aged executive Frank from his hotel. Hidden in the company’s storage room, all four debate the ethics and utility of “meaningful” homicide.
Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells
