Can’t win the fight in the street or score justice in the election booth, what else is one to do? Give up and go home? How about sit down and pen a play against the object of your ire?
That may be a bit hyperbolic, but it’s what Federico Muchnik has done. His Moby Dick is a 21 Walden Square Road affordable housing redevelopment project, which he sees as obtrusive and disruptive to the community. The issue isn’t the affordable housing aspect, but the size (six floors and approximately 100 new units) and its effect on public space, he said. Muchnik, a documentary filmmaker and instructor of visual arts at Lesley University, has made several videos about the proposed project’s effects and circulated a petition against it signed by more than 1,500 people.
It was such activism that led Muchnik to run for City Council in 2023, but now that the experience is just something he embraces as an enlightening learning process, he’s turned to art to express his contempt and outrage, adapting Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” for the purpose.
The play, which has a staged reading at the Cambridge Public Library main branch at 1:30 p.m. March 1, changes a handful of logistics – most obviously, time and place, with Boston politics replacing the inner workings of Parliament – but also the foci of political and moral corruption. In Wilde’s 1894 play it was a sham investment scheme to build the fictional Argentinian Canal (so said to have been inspired by the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869; the Panama Canal began construction by the United States in 1904, four year’s after Wilde’s death, though the French tried a similar project in 1881 and abandoned it in 1889). In Muchnik’s update, it’s a housing house of cards in which developers and politicians get fat off of public funds.
The reason for setting being Boston versus Cambridge, Muchnik said in an interview, was that “there’s an appointed housing czar that lives and works in Boston. I didn’t think the idea of a housing czar in Cambridge, as much as I like it, was as powerful or big enough.” Muchnik’s protagonist, Robert Wilton (Robert Chiltern in Wilde’s original), that czar, has a past misdeed that makes him susceptible to corruption and manipulation, and it’s tied to a South Shore development called (back to Melville) the Pequod.
It took Muchnik about six months to get an adaptation of Wilde’s themes to his liking. That includes the theme that lends the play its title: the idolization of the antihero by his wife, Lady Chiltern, to the degree that she’s blind to his illicit side doings. In Muchnik’s twist, that becomes the inherent and expected public trust citizens have in their politicians (i.e., the City Council), which makes voters complicit.
“The play is designed to remind myself and the world that there is no such thing as a perfect politician,” Muchnik said. “I would like people to take away from it the message that they should, especially in Cambridge, be a little less naive about the politicians and call them to task.”
Muchnik lives near Walden Square, off Richdale Avenue in the house he grew up in, and as a result, has seen much change over his decades as a born and bred “townie” – including the extension of the red line from Harvard Square to Alewife, the spur for much buildup and build-out and resulting project-by-project political and social debate. The recent council-approved zoning change that essentially eliminates single-family zoning is not a target of Muchnik in the play.
The play had a reading this month in New York City. Muchnik said he’d love to see it get produced or a made into a shot-on-location, lo-fi film.
Which would he rather – the play produced (or a film made), or 21 Walden Square get a major redress? “I’d say that’s a choiceless choice,” Muchnik said. “I don’t think I can choose. I guess I would just let the chips fall where they may.”
But after a second, Muchnik added, “If I was the one who had helped stop 21 Walden Square, I would never, ever imagine that I could have such a success in politics again or in community organizing. It’d be a miracle, a fucking miracle. It’s not gonna happen. They’re gonna build the thing, most likely. And that’s unfortunate. So the realist in me says: Get the movie made.”
Muchnik also performs one of the nine speaking parts come the staging. The rest of the cast are revered local performers including Paula Plum and Paul Melendy, he said, as well as comic Tooky Kavanagh.
Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. March 1 at the Cambridge Main Library, 449 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Free.
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