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Part protest, part theater and really communal, the Funeral March for the death of our civil liberties and civil rights took place on the bitingly cold Saturday afternoon of January 15th. About fifty people gathered at the south end of Union Square Park to protest the policies and actions of the Bush administration. Steve and Rage from NION (Not In Our Name) were distributing NOT OUR PRESIDENT posters to put up all over the city in public places. Todd Eaton and his drummers were busy practicing their percussive sounds. Sergeant Chieu from the police force approached Evan Giller and me, noticeable by our unfurled black umbrellas, and introduced himself as being our permit liaison assigned to make our march and protest go as smoothly as possible. He was friendly and we mapped out the march route around the periphery of the park. He asked if we wanted wooden barriers to contain the crowd and we indicated that we didn’t need any. We were fine in our freedom. The Ladies of Liberty in their long skirts and sashes arrived and we assembled for a circuit of the park. Before starting off we practiced our “mourning song” to the tune of “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho”. Mouths Wide Open, a visual arts collective, provided cardboard painted posters depicting on one side, a dead American soldier and other the other, an Iraqi woman holding a dead child. Among the things we mourned were the loss of human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights, voting rights, the environment, peace and justice and human life. But after each stanza we demanded the restoration of each one NOW! The drummers bang a dirge-like drumming and we set off on our march singing our way around the park. Many people along the route asked us what we were doing and they either joined us or supported our efforts to protest the president. After a once around the park, the Ladies of Liberty sang a number songs of protest about women’s rights (choice, abortion and freedom) with new lyrics set to familiar tunes like “Amazing Grace”. At various times members of the marching group joined in. As part of the funeral procession we had a “death of liberty” coffin and this was held by four mourners with a bouquet of flowers placed on it. I gave an impassioned rendition of my eulogy, “Story of a Man”, a parable with a moral about God, the devil and a Man. And then the Ladies of Liberty, by popular demand, sang some more songs. Laura Schliefer, a performance artist, also sang and at the very end, Andrea Liu of THAW (Theaters Against the War) read the powerful “Mourning Statement” that she had composed. We then marched around the park again in a magical spirit of theatrical protest and community that suggested that “Another World Was Possible”. Sergeant Chieu approached us again and asked how things were going and we told him that we had completed our Funeral March. People drifted away and soon all that was left of our presence was the energy of our protest in the place. Howard Pflanzer's plays have been performed at La MaMa ETC, Playwrights Horizons, Symphony Space, Medicine Show and the Kraine Theater (Cocaine Dreams). As a Fulbright Scholar(2003)in India he directed the world premiere of his play, The Terrorist, at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Bombay.
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