Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

Playwright Dohrn debuts with a frank and fascinating chronicle of his experience as the son of Weather Underground fugitives, who were wanted in connection with the group’s 1970s bombings. He describes living one step ahead of the FBI in locations including Oregon, Chicago, and New York City until, in the early ’80s, his mother, Bernardine Dohrn, turned herself in and was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. Dohrn goes into great detail about the Weather Underground’s history as a militant leftist organization, but anchors the account in his intimate experiences as a “Weather Kid,” wondering “why my mother’s loyalty to these apparent strangers seemed to outweigh her commitment to us, her own children.” He provides no easy answers as he grapples with his parents’ commitment to noble ideals at the expense of his and his two younger brothers’ safety, at once somewhat skeptical of his parents’ extreme politics and admiring of their impulse to improve the world by “transform[ing] what was passed down to us in order to make a better future for ourselves and our children and our children’s children.” This is a powerful blend of personal and political history. (May)