Since long before guitarists of my generation affectionately regarded each other as “gearsluts,” Tom Morello has quested relentlessly for the perfect tone. He has famously built and modified his own effects pedals, honed unorthodox playing techniques, and experimented with strange equipment in pursuit of a distinct voice for his instrument. And, during his career as both a guitarist and activist in Rage Against the Machine (RATM), Audioslave, and The Nightwatchman, he has simultaneously shaped the timbre of his worldview. The son of a white American educator-activist mother – herself a “red diaper baby” – and a Kenyan revolutionary father who was involved in the Mau Mau uprising in his home country, Morello inherited serious familial political expectations. That unique heritage is, in part, what inspired his latest collaborator to seek him out. Second-generation playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn, himself born in haste while his political dissident parents were on the run, knew he wanted to write a story about revolution and turned to Morello’s music as a guiding inspiration.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn is the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both founding members of the Weather Underground (WUO), a far-left militant group whose express political goal was to overthrow the United States government. Ayers’s and Dohrn’s involvement in the WUO often necessitated a life of secrecy and sacrifice: ruthlessly surveilled by the FBI and constantly challenged by the repressive power of the state, the personal costs of their radical politics structured young Zayd’s life. Bernadine Dohrn served a prison sentence for refusing to testify against one of her collaborators. Other WUO members were imprisoned or killed. Speaking about his childhood, Ayers Dohrn reflected:

While this meditation on the relationship between the personal and the political may seem, on the surface, vague, Zayd Ayers Dohrn nevertheless grapples with something far more specific than appears at first glance. Yes, change comes with personal costs, but the smoking craters of radical political impact are not identical across time and space. Ayers Dohrn – like Morello, like many who carry the burden of revolutionary inheritance  – emerges from a story so unique that it is difficult to universalize without venturing into cliche.

Brought together by shared roots in Chicago and mutual investment in unspooling the meandering, yarn-balled histories of American radical politics, Morello’s and Ayers Dohrn’s artistic and biographical alignment bore the promise of something truly singular. Speaking about his interest working together, Ayers Dohrn described Morello’s music as having served as an inspirational jolt to his creativity and as a palliative balm to the bleak political backdrop of the first Trump presidency. For the playwright, it “became kind of a soundtrack to that era of resistance. It channeled some of the anger, hope and struggle that I was interested in thinking about.” Ayers Dohrn first considered incorporating Morello’s music into “a kind of underground concert/narrative/protest” in Chicago. This format would have served as a much more capacious and flexible staging than the Broadway-style musical that would become Revolution(s), which earned an extended run at Chicago’s Goodman Theater from October 4th through November 22nd in 2025.

Focusing on the story of the Weems family, the musical flips between the relationship backstory of parents Emma and Leon and the present-day struggles of sons Hampton and Ernie. Having recently returned to Chicago from the war in Afghanistan, Hampton re-enters the South Side to confront his past relationships and life of political activism. His brother, Ernie, has been learning to play guitar really, really well (a legacy we eventually learn is secretly inherited from Leon) while lamenting the familial strife caused by his brother’s militancy (both at home and abroad) and his father’s ongoing prison sentence. Ernie spends most of the show stewing, resentful of the collective cost of his brother’s and father’s choices, turning to music as an outlet for his generational frustration. Ernie’s character acts as a voice for both Morello and Ayers Dohrn throughout the show: he is the artist grappling with the same questions the two showrunners have openly asked throughout their careers. Is it possible to ever fully disaggregate — or fully merge — one’s artistic and political pursuits? On what grounds, and to what extent, can one opt in or out of their family’s political entanglements? How do we navigate the consequences of our parents’ ideological commitments? 

But while Ernie can sometimes seem like an avatar for the show’s creators, it is really the relationship between the two Weems sons that most completely reflects the artist-activist’s soul at odds with itself. While Hampton is a firebrand, ready to set the world on fire (literally) at even the slightest provocation, Ernie is cautious, reflective, sensitive. That isn’t to say Hampton’s character is presented as an approbation – his righteous anger comes across as well-justified, necessary fuel for the fire of political militancy – but rather serves as a Fuck-shit-up foil to Ernie’s Jot-this-down. When Hampton learns that Ernie can shred on guitar with the urgency and vigor of a sous-chef prepping hashbrowns for impatient brunchers, he struggles to convince his brother to join him and his longtime flame Lucia at an upcoming protest. We don’t learn anything substantive about the protest, its stakes, or its objectives, but Ernie doesn’t need any of that detail to feel skeptical about offering his musical abilities to the cause. He is afraid of the consequences of rebellion, preferring to keep his Morello-inspired pentatonic riffs to himself. (It is worth acknowledging that Jakeim Hart, who portrayed Ernie, worked extensively with Morello on his guitar playing while prepping for the musical. And it showed, with Hart breaking out some signature Morello effects and techniques throughout his captivating instrumental performance.)

It is no spoiler that Ernie eventually comes around to the idea of mixing art and activism. The show’s most meaningful thematic clarity arrives with the conclusion that the artist’s role in political movements is to nourish and ignite the soul, that without an artistic attenuation to both our collective and individual humanity, politics risk leaking out their life force and becoming sterile strategy. It is in this message that Revolution(s) finds its most solid footing. As Hampton and Ernie are plagued by setbacks in both their personal lives and political pursuits, Morello and Ayers Dohrn use their protagonists’ inherited artistic talents to voice hope that, through art, families can bequeath sustenance and insight from one generation to the next. But by focusing so intensely on the transmission of talent from parent to child, the message risks failing to reach the masses it aims to inspire. Are not we, the audience, also potential inheritors of the Weems, Ayers Dohrn, and Morello families’ artistic talents? Most of us do not emerge from artistic families, from activist families, but still crave inspiration and seek insight from those that do. For transformative change to ripple outward, many root systems must be stitched together into something porous and collectively generative, expansive in its concept of kinship. Revolution(s), instead, focuses on the gritty, solitary survival of one sacred family tree.  

The Goodman Theater warned us many times that Revolution(s) would be loud. They meant this literally – that the huge guitar cabinets would challenge dainty eardrums more attuned to ballads, that the extra subwoofers specially installed under the stage would startle those accustomed to enjoying the polite pitter patter of realist dialogue. And, whether or not they meant to, they also forewarned our older, whiter, Chicago Loop audience that this performance’s contents may not sit as comfortably for them within musical theater’s political lexicon as those of Hamilton or Rent. And while the show ultimately faltered in its self-proclaimed mission to ignite revolutionary thought, it fulfilled its promise of bravely channeling a unique spectacle of both auditory and thematic discomfort for mainstream, largely liberal theatergoers. Most surprisingly, the show takes a neutral stance on political violence, narrating its characters’ outbursts of righteous, destructive anger without direct condemnation. While the discipline required to resist a knee-jerk rebuke of radical political action bolsters the show’s politics, the subtlety of such restraint melts into the background. In direct contrast, the show’s sonic experience announces itself furiously, demanding recognition for its singularity in the catalog of American musical theater.

The musical performance itself is ravenous to the point of all-consuming. If anything, the instrumentation drowns out so many of the lyrics that audience members often have no choice but to bask in the full force and fury of Morello’s score. And yet, despite its formidable core of catchy, bassy, fuzzy Morellian riffs, Revolution(s) may seem like a musical outlier to those who only know Morello’s work with Rage Against the Machine. The show features a familiar cocktail of metal, punk, and hip hop reminiscent of RATM, but also weaves in folk songs drawn from the Americana tradition’s legacy of politically rebellious music. The show’s numbers, mostly drawn from Morello’s extensive back catalog, reflect the wide range of collaborators Morello has enlisted to write with him over the years, including rappers Killer Mike and Big Boi, funk-soul-R&B legend (and filmmaker) Boots Riley, and country singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton. Such bold co-writing ultimately pays off in the context of a live theater production. The songs power up the audience with a dynamism derived from Morello’s decades of experimentation with sounds that supercharge angry, defiant lyrics. They are songs that light matches, igniting fuel that lays dormant in even the most unsuspecting spectators.

But despite Morello’s impassioned efforts, the chosen format still places certain limitations on the content and structure of the work. For one, the fidgety dance between dialogue and song required by the genre conventions leaves very little room for any particular political concept to stretch its legs. We get served lots of key words, sung lots of mantras, but they arrive in bites. This thematic dispersion is exacerbated by the show’s own fracturing: the story flips rapidly between multiple timelines, several of which simultaneously inhabit distinct slices of the stage. The result is a splintering of narrative and experience that is only temporarily subsumed by the cast’s energetic convergence during musical numbers. And while the co-creators could not have been expected to completely renovate musical theater as a genre, many of the show’s other limitations were self-imposed: most notably, its decision to tether itself so completely to the paradigm of the American nuclear family. 

Radical families brought the two artists together, and a mutual desire to interrogate both “radical” and “family” should have allowed headroom to also explore the friction between the two terms. Revolution(s), instead, platforms “family” in a totalizing, paradigmatic way that consumes its plot and hems in its thematic potential. The musical, both set and performed in Chicago, paints the city and its politics as a two-dimensional backdrop for the artists’ reflective wrestling matches with their family histories rather than as a living diorama of ongoing revolutionary struggle. Even then, centering the show around the idea of family as a site of political turmoil, as a porous container for revolutionary struggle, was not necessarily the problem. The failure, rather, stems from Revolution(s)’s unwillingness to consider a more fundamental critique of the nuclear family. While the show takes a reflective look into the ways marriage, parenthood, and generational inheritance intersect with radical politics, we are ultimately left wondering: what if traditional family systems inhibit, rather than propel revolutionary struggle? In its frenetic determination to paint a complex family portrait, the show rushes past the thought that the frame is too small. The showrunners claimed to want to spark revolutionary thought and to push audiences to envision bold, fresh radical futures, but got stuck in the most familiar confines possible: home – where parents and children learn how to disappoint and forgive each other.

That said, Ayers Dohrn embarked on this creative journey knowing that both “revolutions” and Revolution(s) would contain contradictory ideas. In an interview about the show’s conception, he identifies that “revolution” is a “contranym’,”  a word that denotes multiple opposing meanings. In this example, revolution is either a bold, frightening new beginning, or a cyclical return home. Similarly, Revolution(s) cannot help but be at odds with itself: it attempts to look forward while taking us back to terrain that is comfortable for its creators, and maybe for us, too. Rather than treating the “new beginning” and “return home” as distinct but connected spokes on a wheel – forces that can appear opposite but simultaneously generate shared velocity – the two concepts undermine each other’s power. In an interview about the show’s connection to his own history, Ayers Dohrn evoked Marx, saying, “Marx says that ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,’ and I’m fascinated by the quality of that weight; how, basically, we’re all haunted by the past. We can’t figure out how to move forward without hearing the echoes of history. That’s true in politics and in art.”

Note how Ayers Dohrn collapses the expansive and collective past referenced here by Marx into a specific, personal one. This reading of Marx conjures history as a ghost that possesses us until it is exorcised, as a spectre that frightens individuals into paralysis and prevents them from “moving forward.” What if the nightmares of the past, instead, force us to act? To run, to evade, to destroy? Marx, a man of constant dialectical motion, would have likely preferred such a reading. The ghost is not in the attic or under the bed – it is in the factory, in the airport, in the courthouse, in the town square. The nightmare is out there; we cannot imagine it as one stuck at home.  

Despite these thematic shortcomings, Revolution(s) communicates earnestly about the vulnerable act of creating art – and about the unenviably difficult task of imbuing art with political value. Both in its portrayal of artist-activism and in its attempt to synthesize the creators’ own ambitions as artist-activists, the show ripples with the frustration of a person questioning their own purpose, of a person doubting their own utility. A more complete commitment to exploring the role of the artist could have given more space for the show’s most interesting questions to breathe: questions about art’s capacity to thrive symbiotically with radical politics, about how artists and revolutionaries can mutually sustain connection to their individual and collective purposes. Likewise, a clearer focus on the nuclear family’s material and systemic relationship to revolutionary struggle also could have opened the door for more universal insight and emotional impact. Either approach could have pushed the show closer to its own stated goal of sparking new, revolutionary thought. Still pulsing with lingering waves of energy from my bassy musical baptism, I left the theater wanting to reflect, to dream, to scheme. 

In a moment when the last pillars of the American experiment are visibly crumbling – our twentieth century optimism alongside our twentieth century infrastructure – Revolution(s) clings to the past, and to the traditional structure of the family to inspire hope for renewal of radical spirit. And the past, dust though it may be, does conjure a certain comfort. The radical spirit from “that” time (the 20s? 60s? the 70s?), in retrospect, seems to make more sense to us than the radical contemporary, both because of its past-ness and because the political struggles of bygone eras have become legend for us. The temptation to stay trapped in a finite loop of time provides temporary comfort, lest we turn our gaze towards the frightening, unknowable future. But the house has already fallen apart, the dream dissolved with it. Why must we confine ourselves to living in the rubble?

Jordan Baldridge is a scholar, critic, and musician living in New York City. He is a doctoral student in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark, where he traces the lines that connect art, politics, and the built environment.

Article photo: Cover to Pionery (1918), Russian chapbook edition of Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers” linoleum cut with added watercolor by Vera Ermolaeva via Public Domain Review.

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