Debs: An American Tragedy, Part One, Public Staged Reading

Name: Debs: An American Tragedy, Part One, Public Staged Reading
Start: 2025-10-19T14:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-10-19T17:30:00-04:00
Location: Wabash Activity Center

Schedule

Sun Oct 19 2025 at 02:30 pm to 05:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Wabash Activity Center | Terre Haute, IN

About the Performance:
Join us for the first-ever public presentation of Debs: An American Tragedy, Part One, the first of a two-part American epic concerning the life of Eugene V. Debs, American Socialist, and his last revolution of a nation's conscience, written by Benjamin Fulk and directed by Arthur Feinsod.
This event, a staged reading, is, in itself, an intimate opportunity to experience the language, characters, and story in its rawest and most essential form as well as a chance to experience an important step toward the play's realization as a fully-staged production.
Today, as the nation continues to wrestle with questions of democracy, labor, and dissent, Debs' story speaks with renewed urgency. From his roots in Terre Haute, his voice rose to challenge the nation and now, this new American epic begins its journey in the very place where his own began.
About the Play:
Debs: An American Tragedy, Part One follows Eugene V. Debs through a moment of retreat and reckoning. Beginning in the fall of 1916, the play finds Debs defeated and determined to keep his promise to his wife Kate to step away from politics. However, his encounter with Mabel Dunlap Curry, a young admirer whose passion rekindles his ideals, sets him back on a political path and a collision course with private love, loyalty, and conscience. As the United States enters World War I and its government silences dissent through the Espionage Act, Debs is forced to choose between personal obligation and public duty, culminating in his historic 1918 Canton speech, an act that transforms him into a symbol of resistance and free speech but with major personal consequences.