Dr. Jonathan
A WWI-era drama that pulses with the anxieties of a nation in transformation. When George Pindar prepares to leave for the front, he confronts his father Asher over a factory humming with discontent: workers demanding union recognition, resentment festering in the assembly lines, and the question of what kind of country they'll be fighting for. Into this charged New England home arrives Dr. Jonathan Pindar, a cousin with a scientific mind and radical ideas about economic democracy. What unfolds is a clash of ideals between father and son, labor and capital, tradition and change, all played out in the intimate space of a library where the future of an empire, industrial and otherwise, hangs in the balance. Churchill, the American novelist writing in 1915, captured a nation at a crossroads. The war overseas mirrored the war brewing in American factories. This play asks what democracy actually means when workers have no voice in the profits their labor creates. It was written before the Russian Revolution, before the Red Scare, when reform still seemed possible. For readers who love period drama and want to understand the ideological wars that shaped the twentieth century.
