If our species has developed anything like a collective conscience, it’s to the extent that we know our past. History doesn’t just measure our growth, we also need to know the crimes we’re capable of.
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Ragged Dick is not meant to embalm an ugly past, as Steppenwolf’s reverent Grapes of Wrath did Steinbeck’s survivors. To Bell, who teaches play writing at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, the greedy past is too close to the 1990s.
“I’m trying to bring the past into the present,” Bell says, “and show how one reporter becomes aware enough to make a difference.
To prepare for Ragged Dick, Immediate director Jeff Ginsberg and his cast of 12 immersed themselves in the squalid past and present. Besides absorbing Riis’s seminal photo essay How the Other Half Lives, the cast took field trips to the Field Museum’s ongoing photographic exhibit on the homeless, to the Hull House museum on South Halsted, to what’s left of the near-west-side neighborhood Jane Addams served, and to the courthouse where the anarchists’ trial was held and the four “martyrs” hanged. Two of the actors who play derelicts also visited warming shelters like the Pacific Garden Mission on South State.
