No play in the history of theater presents a deeper or more lacerating vision of the inhuman nuts and bolts of starvation, from the poetics of paucity to the politics of poverty, than Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 naturalistic masterpiece The Weavers. Based on fact – a riot by the horrifically oppressed weavers of Silesia in 1844 – the epic script has been saddled with the dubious honor of being called the “first socialist play” since the rebelling weavers are positioned as the drama’s collective hero.
