Jacob Rosenblum

DNC 108 - Bajuk

March 2, 2014
The Man Who Was Thursday
In February 2014, the iDiOM Theater in downtown Bellingham put on a performance of
The Man Who Was Thursday, written by Glenn Hergenhahn-Zhao, who also founded iDiOM
in 2001. The play was a loose adaptation from the novel of the same name by G. K. Chesterton,
written in 1908, about a police detective who attempts to infiltrate a secret cabal of dangerous
anarchists, by befriending a poet on a soapbox, in order to stop an impending bomb plot.
In the play, the police detective Gabriel Syme successfully infiltrates the underground
secret meeting place of the anarchists, and joins their ranks, taking a name based on a day of the
week: Thursday. The apparent leader of the group is Sunday, and each other actor is an unlikely
stereotype of an anarchist: a German nihilist professor with an extreme accent and hair coming
out of every orifice, a French marquis with a fake elongated nose, a Russian lady, again with an
extreme accent, to name a few.
As a member of the audience, I regarded these actors with suspicion; their accents
werent that great, the added facial hair and bodily modifications were so overtly apparent that I
wondered at the budget of this little theater. Their accents varied from convincingly hilarious to
paltry. However, over the course of the play, our detective unmasks one anarchist after another
as playing the same role that he is: a police agent who had infiltrated the anarchist circle. The
actor then drops the accent, removes the fake nose, and whatever other peculiar affectation, to
show me that I had been completely taken in by the actors, since I believed them to be
completely the role that they were playing: bad actors.

In this play was a synthesis of Old and New Comedy styles, with the extreme affectations
and situational absurdity lending one aspect of the humor, complemented by being placed into
the shoes of our hero who doesnt know what he has gotten himself into, and tries to keep up his
image. As each character is unmasked as a police agent, we learn that only one character, the
secretary of the protagonist, is truly an anarchist. She masterminded getting each of them to
infiltrate the group, and set up a bomb plot to target exactly six people.
As each successive spy is realized, the audience realizes that the police infiltrators
themselves are the targets. Just as they are all brought together and realize they are trapped, the
play introduces a touch of propaganda. The true mastermind of the operation takes the
opportunity to decry their trust in orderliness, and preaches to them about the true nature of the
world: chaos and disorder. After giving this politicized speech, she leaves the characters to
expect to be killed by the bomb. Eventually, they realize that nothing is happening, and there is
no bomb. They leave, one by one, humiliated by the experience, but very much alive.
Theater is a good example of a participative experience that the authors of our text refer
to; we involve ourselves directly with the actors, experiencing what they are experiencing,
unaware of ourselves as present in a location; instead, completely enveloped into their world.
This storyline is a timeless tale, since the tension between order and disorder has and always will
exist. On the other hand, the changing political environment, the fact that we relate to anarchists
differently today in Bellingham than they did in London in 1908, means that the relevance of the
story will change, the play will mean different things to different people. Along these same lines,
a person seeing this play may have an augmented experience of it if they know that anarchism
was a popular political ideology in Europe in the early 1900s, and that European leaders were
afraid of anarchists.