Scabmuggers

The design braids three strands. The labor anthem — ‘Bread and Roses’ sung by the full cast, the Pipettes’ ‘Step by step,’ a solo a cappella ‘Joe Hill’ — is sung, never just played. Harvard’s institutional percussion — gavels, slammed folders, slammed mugs, breaking chalk — is weaponized against the organizers. And the cold-dawn quiet of the Morning Glories’ church-basement circle, ‘breath visible’ three times across the play, is where the truth gets told. The design moves between those registers so the audience tracks power, not plot: who has the gavel, who has the song, who can breathe. The arc runs from inherited song to claimed song — opening with ‘Bread and Roses’ as somebody else’s labor history, closing with Simone naming the women whose work she now belongs to.