The Weavers

The Weavers centers a community of textile workers and their equally rattled bosses whose understanding of labor, sense of faith, and humanity is pressed to the brink by the unstoppable march of mechanization, automation, and the free-fall collapse of empathy. #willAItakemyjob

Made possible with generous support from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), and MIT Future Fest.

Starring Brad Burgess, Parker Jennings, Cristhian Mancinas-García, Sally Rose Zuckert, Jorge Rubio, Mitra Sharif, Hui Ying Wen, and Hugo Nelson; with stage design by Joseph Lark-Riley; video and interactive design by Peter Torpey with Anna Borou Yu; camera operated by Yanyi Liu; clothing design by Jonathan Fajors; sound design by Christian Frederickson; lighting design by Xinyu Xu; in collaboration with director of production Maggie Moore; stage manager Molly Bercutt; dramaturg Zishan Ugurlu.

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About the play

The Weavers portrays a community of textile laborers pushed to the brink of collapse by poverty, wage cuts, and the rapid advance of industrial machinery, robotics, and automation. Actual hunger is the new reality and as it spreads, dignity erodes. In the play, the weavers gather to debate whether to endure their biblically-proportioned suffering or risk collective revolt against the manufacturers who control their lives. No hero emerges as the play unfolds and the force and effect of the pressure as it moves through families, bars, and workshops spares no one. When the protests begin, and protesters are shot, a rebellion erupts—it is chaotic, desperate, and ever unresolved—revealing a terrible inversion of triumph. But the brutal force of a system that renders both submission and resistance insufficient still tragically remains…

About the dramatist

Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) was a German playwright and novelist best known as a leading figure of literary Naturalism in the German-language theater and renowned for bringing working-class life, social injustice, and economic brutality to the stage with unprecedented verisimilitude. His landmark play The Weavers (1892) depicts an exploited labor uprising in a landscape of collective protagonism that shocked audiences of its time and was subsequently banned for its depiction of labor revolt. Born in Silesia, Hauptmann achieved international recognition with Before Sunrise (1889), followed by The Weavers (1892), Lonely Lives (1891), The Beaver Coat (1893), and The Sunken Bell (1896). Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912, Hauptmann was a meteoric force in the shaping of contemporary European theater.