The Daredevils

A twelve-year-old boy middle son in a wealthy politically and culturally prominent San Francisco family watches his city disappear in the earthquake and fires of 1906. His father him that nothing has been lost that cannot be swiftly and easily replaced. He quotes Virgil: Nothing unreal is allowed to survive. The boy turns this stark Stoic philosophical consolation into the radical theater practices of the day in the course of which he involves himself with radical labor struggles: anarchists Wobblies socialists of every stripe. He learns that politics is meta-acting and he and his girlfrienda Connecticut mill girl who is on the verge of national recognition as a spokesperson for workersembark on a speaking tour with a Midwestern anti-railroad pro-farmer group and take their political philosophical and artistic ethos to the farthest limits of the real and the unreal where they find there is no useful distinction between the two.