Labor of love

Local singer and playwright perform in celebration at Worker's Center

Lindsay Ropiak for The Maine Campus

Harlan Baker performs as Jimmy Higgins in his one man show "Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement" during the Third Annual Labor Day Festival at the Solidarity Center in Brewer. The Festival was co-sponsored by Food AND Medicine and the Eastern Maine Labor Council.

By Maddy Glover

Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009, 1:57 am

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“Have you ever read Marx? Neither have I,” admits the title character in “Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement,” written and performed by Harlan Baker.

Baker’s Jimmy Higgins and folksinger Cormac McCarthy headlined Food AND Medicine’s annual Labor Day celebration on Sept. 7 at the Solidarity Center in Brewer.

Despite missing main act Bill Morrisey, McCarthy, a South Berwick folksinger, proved a worthy replacement.

Food AND Medicine is a non-profit organization whose mission is to organize, educate and empower workers and local communities in the fight for economic and social justice.

The Solidarity Center overlooks the Penobscot River. It’s a colorful, utilitarian building that houses the means to achieve what is set forth by the organization. The center acted as a temporary dining hall for the Labor Day celebration. Audience members stepped through the glass door to serve themselves food brought by FAM organizers and volunteers.

People milled about, eating, chatting and enjoying the sunshine. Audience members included several state politicians such as Reps. Adam Goode and Benjamin Pratt, gubernatorial candidate Lynne Williams and Senate President Libby Mitchell, among others.

Actor, playwright and professor, Harlan Baker always wanted to do a staged reading of Karl Marx’s “The Manifesto.” Fascinated by the possible combination of theater and America’s labor movement history, Baker toyed with the idea of a more crowd-pleasing work. Inspired by Jimmie Higgins, a fictional cartoon character in the Democratic Left who represented the rank-and-file factory worker of the early 20th century, Baker wrote “Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement.” In the play he makes several references to Marx, but leaves the Manifesto alone.

Baker’s Higgins grew up in Sandusky, Ohio. His father owned the local leftist newspaper. Throughout the play Higgins works as a typographer, a campaigner and a reporter who covers labor action news. From witnessing Eugene Debs speak to protecting himself from Henry Ford’s henchman during the Battle of the Overpass, Higgins remains human and, more importantly, fallible. Baker maintains that Higgins is an observer and not the main character.

“I wanted to make the characters as human as possible. [Higgins] makes mistakes: He occasionally backs down. He even defends himself with a rock in a fight. It’s what I would’ve done; I’m terrible in fights,” Baker chuckled, referring to a part in scene eight where Higgins reclaims his stolen notebook by striking the thief with a rock.

Baker described the significance of being an actor in Maine: “[It] means you don’t work a lot,” he said. Clad in suspenders and tie, he explained that he has always wanted to attempt the difficult one-man act; he certainly achieves this in Jimmy Higgins. Using few props and many characters, his performance was well received.

It is important to read Baker’s positive disclaimer on the play’s program: “This play is not designed to be just a passive experience. During any crowd scene, please feel free to respond verbally when prompted by Jimmy Higgins.”

Baker insisted “the whole idea is to bring the story to the audience, to bring it where the people are.” Audience members appeared to value this consideration.

The second performer, Cormac McCarthy engaged the audience in a similar fashion. Singing of hardship, good times and all things Maine, McCarthy’s lyricism and instrumental prowess was evident. Lines such as, “an IQ the size of a scrabble score,” provided a glimpse at the breadth of Mc- Carthy’s humor. Dressed in Johnny Cash black with a harmonica ready to go, he prefaced the next song: “I’m just going to play a little Celtic punk number for you.” The audience laughed.

The song, “Immigrant Gangster,” tells the story of his Scotch-Irish grandfather, a hustler. He sang, “cost my soul to feed my family then I know I’ve played my part.”

“Maine has no redeeming qualities of any kind,” Mc- Carthy said. “Fifteen miles in from the coast, and it’s Mississippi. And I’ve toured in Mississippi.”

He waved off some good-natured boos by telling how, when the Soviet Union dissolved, he wanted to offer Maine as the new evil empire.

“Puh-lease, just for once if you told the truth about a place, people would rally around it.” He began to strum a song that sounded like the Doors’s “People are Strange.” He acknowledged this with the title “When You’re in Maine,” telling of chickens that wear lipstick, urbane sheep and the fact that Maine gets stranger once you’re mucking out stalls and picking up bones.

“Blue Cadillac” is about Hank Williams, Sr., accompanied by the message that evil lies within.

McCarthy croons, “praise hurt him worse than a whipping.” “Pretty Boy Floyd” tells of a Robin Hood of Oklahoma, and McCarthy’s “Love Song” speaks of how the harder you look for something, the harder it is to find—until you don’t need it anymore, and there it is.

As the sun began to set over the Penobscot, audience members helped pick up trash and put away chairs. Community is everything at Food AND Medicine, especially on Labor Day.