Gene Bruskin: The Moment Was and Is Now
a profile by Mike Maggio
To meet Gene Bruskin is to meet a titan of the labor movement. Talking with him opens up a world that most history books barely broach. A tall, burly man with a booming voice, wispy gray hair and a constant cough that interrupts just about every other sentence, Bruskin is the embodiment of what it means to be a grassroots labor organizer. His knowledge of history—particularly labor history—is downright scholarly. He is a graduate of Princeton University, a recently retired labor official (he likes to use the word “redeployed”), and the author of The Moment Was Now, a musical about an imaginary meeting between Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and other important historical figures who played a major role in the labor movement and the struggle for racial and social justice. Bruskin wrote the musical’s book, lyrics, and melodies. He collaborated with Darryl Moch, Glenn Pearson and Chestor Burke Jr. on musical arrangements. The play had its world debut at Emmanuel Episcopal Church Theater in September 2019 and will run again from February 28 through March 8 2020, at the same theater, commemorating Black History and Women’s History months. Bruskin has lived and worked in the D.C. area since 1990.
Bruskin is the grandson of Russian and Romanian immigrants. His Russian grandparents fled the pogroms. His father became a communist in the 1930s, though he gave up his radical activism after serving in World War II. As a youth, Bruskin was unaffected by the radical influences he grew up around. Instead, he was interested in playing basketball, eventually landing a scholarship to Princeton.
“I wasn't a political activist of any kind,” he tells me over an egg and bagel sandwich while sitting on an outdoor patio in Tenleytown, on an unusually warm January day. “I was a jock. I wanted to be a great basketball player.”
Gene Bruskin. Photograph by Sean Scheidt.
Then things took a major turn.
“I was swept right up into the middle of the counter-cultural thing. The Vietnam draft. I didn't want to go to this war. I didn't agree with it.”
After college, Bruskin wanted to be a school teacher, and he says military deferments for teachers were possible only if you taught in places like the Bronx in New York City: a place the draft board, according to Bruskin, considered more dangerous than Vietnam.
So Bruskin took a job teaching elementary school in the Bronx. It was a radicalizing moment because, for the first time, he saw what real poverty looked like. Bruskin soon realized that he was “out of his league.” He had had no training, and the school offered no support. “One day, one of my favorite kids came in, and he kept disrupting the class, and I finally lost it. Then during recess, one of his friends came up to me and said: ‘don't be too mad at Eugene. His father shot his mother this morning.’ They didn't know what to do with him so they sent him to school.”
After this incident, when the school’s response disappointed him, Bruskin came to the conclusion that the school system really didn’t care about the kids. Frustrated, Bruskin quit teaching and went to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade to cut sugar cane. A radical political organization, the Venceremos was formed to support the Cuban people. “The idea was to break the [American] blockade and show solidarity with the Cubans. That sent me into the radical movements in the 70s. The counter-cultural things—antiwar, Black Panther. Eventually I got into the labor movement by accident.”
Labor movement march. Creative commons image. Flickr by AFGE.
Not all accidents lead to success. This particular one, however, led to a career that lasted 40 years. Bruskin has had few official titles, he ended up organizing many grass-roots union fights and became president of the local Bus Drivers Union in Boston in 1978.
“After that, I became an organizer for the Laundry Workers Union, and I got a job offer in D.C. So I continued the rest of my career mostly as an organizer, but then became sort of a campaign coordinator.”
In Boston Bruskin started writing musicals, having grown up on Broadway plays. He helped organize a group called the Red Basement Singers, which performed on picket lines, singing antiwar and pro-union songs. Then he wrote two musicals set in Boston: The Stolen Bicycle Blues and It’s Not the Bus, the latter centered around the issue of busing.
After retiring in 2012, Bruskin became interested again in writing plays about the labor struggle and the struggle for racial equality. Having read Black Reconstruction by W. E.B. Du Bois and learned about strikes organized by black workers in Baltimore, he began incorporating some of these ideas into his plays.
He wrote a play, Pray for the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny, presented as a dramatic reading to a number of unions. On Baltimore’s waterfront, he discovered the Douglas Meyers Museum, which is dedicated to Frederick Douglass and Isaac Meyers. Meyers was an organizer who formed trade unions among black workers and later organized black laborers into unions across the country.
The Moment Is Now, performed in 2019. From left to right: Darryl Moch as Isaac Myers; Ari Jacobson as William Sylvis; Julia Nixon as Frances Harper; Jenna Stein as Susan B Anthony. Photograph by Sean Scheidt.
After extensive research—Bruskin says he read about 50 books—he wrote The Moment Was Now, a musical about a fictitious meeting between Douglass (LeCount Holmes), Meyers (Darryl Moch, also the director), and other historical figures including Susan B. Anthony (Jenna Stein) who tried to convince the trade unions to include women in their ranks, and William Sylvis (Ariel Jacobson), a white union organizer who founded the National Labor Union. Though this meeting never happened, these historical figures did have relationships with each other in real life.
“I did extensive research, hand-pulled keywords and phrases from [the historical figures writing] to build songs and spoken word, but used my own words to fill in the blanks.”
Bruskin ran into one problem: his play was missing a representative for black women. Surely, during that time period, the movement must have included a black female figure. That’s when he discovered Frances Harper (Julia Nixon), one of the first African-American literary figures, as well as an abolitionist and suffragette.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Illus. in: William Still, The Underground Railroad, p. 748. Library of Congress public domain image. https://lccn.loc.gov/2002698208
The characters in The Moment Was Now have common goals, yet they are not always on the same page. That’s the source of the dramatic conflict. Anthony clashes with Douglass over the 15th amendment, which gave black men the right to vote but left women without representation. The historical Anthony broke with the abolitionist movement, putting her interest in women’s rights, particularly those of white women, above the rights of all women. In the play, Frances Harper decides to stand with Douglass, announcing, in a song that Bruskin says rouses audiences every time it’s sung, that black women will always stand with their brothers.
Which brings us to a key question: why a musical? How does one take an ugly period in American history—filled with racism, classism, and sexism—and turn it into song without losing its potency? What creative choices does a playwright make to decide to write a musical as opposed to straight drama?
Bruskin mulls this question over and then responds: “There’s something very powerful about what you can do with music. Like the song [in this musical] ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky.’ I got a note from one of the railroad workers that came, and he said ‘I really liked this play. The only problem is my wife told me about six times a day, women hold up half the sky.’ So, it’s ‘song stick.’ ”
“Song stick” is what has made Hamilton, which also translates history into musical theater, such a success. “I was fascinated by the way [Lin-Manuel Miranda] could teach history through spoken word and music. And of course, the contradiction of having all the characters be black and Latino. But politically, it was a very safe play. So I decided I was going to use the idea of music, and I was going to tell history from the perspective that I think is true.”
Frederick Douglass, photograph by George Francis Schreiber, 1803-1892. Library of Congress public domain image. https://lccn.loc.gov/2004671911
As he continues promoting his radical historical musical, Bruskin has found some interest in Boston and is hoping to bring it there. In addition, discussions are taking place about bringing it to a number of other cities. What about D.C.? “I could do it in D.C. if somebody wanted to produce it. Somebody has to want to make it happen. They’d have to provide a theater and to provide the resources. If I found that, I would love to do it.”
The Moment Was Now runs from February 28 through March 8, 2020 at
Emmanuel Episcopal Church Theater
811 Cathedral St.
Baltimore MD 21201
Tickets are available at www.TheMomentWasNow.com
Gene Bruskin’s papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst library.
If you want to support The Moment Is Now, visit Bruskin’s GoFundMe.
Gene Bruskin was born to a Jewish working class family in South Philadelphia and has been a life-long social justice activist, union organizer, poet, and playwright. Since retiring from organizing, Gene has been writing. His musical comedy for and about work and workers is called Pray For the Dead-A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny. Pray also played as a radio drama on more than 30 public radio stations. Gene lives in Silver Spring Maryland with his wife Evie and his daughter Nadja.
Mike Maggio has published fiction, poetry, reviews and Arabic translations in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. Currently, he is the Northern Regional Vice-President for the Poetry Society of Virginia. He is also an associate-editor at Potomac Review and recently served as a judge for the Oregon Poetry Association’s annual poetry contest. He is the author of Your Secret Is Safe With Me, an audio collection of poems, Oranges From Palestine (and other poems), two collections of short fiction, Sifting Through the Madness and The Keepers, and a full-length collection of poetry, deMockracy, a hard-hitting, poetic critique of the Bush administration. He has also published a full length novel, The Wizard and the White House, a novella, The Appointment, and most recently a collection of short stories Letters from Inside. Find him online at www.MikeMaggio.net.