Media attention is oxygen for arts organizations and performers, and most storefront theaters would be grateful for a little unexpected publicity. Pam Dickler’s one-woman show, “I Killed Andy Breitbart”—which will be playing September 6-7 at the Apollo Theater before traveling to Dickler’s hometown of Philadelphia for a brief engagement later in September—is an object lesson in being careful about what you wish for.
Under the direction of Drew Martin, “Breitbart” is the true account of how Dickler’s local, now-defunct Terrapin Theatre put on a show titled “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky” back in 1998, which, fourteen years later, became weaponized by certain Obama-hating wingnuts, who managed to throw Dickler’s life into temporary disarray. Thirteen years after feeling the heat of an online feeding frenzy, Dickler has room to reflect on her strange, frightening but not entirely unfarcical experience, and to share her memories and insights with viewers.
“It’s about how something goes viral,” says Dickler, in a cafe in Old Town. “We went from a small theater company doing a play to public accusations that I had the key to preventing the reelection of Barack Obama. The play is my personal story of how these things take on a life of their own. It shows how an uncomfortable, small level of fame can happen like that,” punctuating her words with an emphatic finger snap.
Her play is an intimate, detailed look at her moment in the crosshairs of the far-right smear machine, and neither Dickler nor this writer wishes to spoil the solo show by revealing too much. But in brief, an improbable confluence of circumstances made the soft-spoken, resolutely unfanatical Dickler Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the proto-MAGA Tea Party movement, which cast her as the evil mastermind of an undisprovable “cover-up” that made the later Pizzagate pseudo-scandal look positively rational by comparison.
It began when, thanks to her brother-in-law’s friendship with the late Tony-nominated playwright Herb Schapiro, Dickler got her hands on Schapiro’s play about Saul Alinsky, the mid-twentieth-century Chicago-based activist who launched the Industrial Areas Foundation and whose books “Rules for Radicals” and “Reveille for Radicals” defined community organizing strategy and tactics up to the present day. “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky” opened in the fall of 1998 at Pilsen’s Blue Rider Theater before moving to the larger Chernin Center on Roosevelt Road, with long-time local actor-director-writer Gary Houston in the title role. (“Gary was Alinsky,” says Dickler. “His knowledge of city history was encyclopedic.”) As an extra, panel discussions about the Alinsky legacy were held after Sunday showings, including one featuring a former Alinsky-style organizer on the South Side named Barack Obama (misspelled as “Baraka” Obama on the poster), then a state senator with little name recognition but big ambitions.
“The Love Song of Saul Alinsky” poster/Courtesy Pam Dickler
Obama was “amazing,” says Dickler. “None of us knew who he was, but everybody was rapt. He stayed focused on the topic and never campaigned. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t record it.”
The play enjoyed some packed houses and a favorable notice by Tribune critic Richard Christiansen, before fading into the hazy afterlife of all finished theatrical runs. And that was it.
Until early 2012, when odd messages started appearing on computer message boards, a phenomenon written up by then-Reader columnist Michael Miner, who recently passed away. The poster of the 1998 Alinsky show mentioning “Baraka” Obama had become a collector’s item, much sought-after by extremist types seeking to prove that the president was a communist.
Say what? Alinsky was a populist and a trouble-maker, but he operated within the limits of the system and was no ideologue, a fact that made him less than popular with the anti-capitalist left. None of that mattered: By 2012, Obama’s lapsed, long-ago connection with Alinsky’s direct-action methods—used by everybody nowadays, especially Trump followers—tarred the erstwhile activist as an America-hating subversive. The fact that Hillary Clinton had written her master’s thesis on Alinsky and was rumored to have been offered a job by him at one point didn’t help. The “Love Song” poster became Exhibit A in the media case against Obama, and Dickler became the key figure in the “conspiracy” to shield him.
“I was working on a Broadway show at the time, and got a call from somebody asking if there was a video of Obama’s panel discussion,” says Dickler. “I said no, because there wasn’t, although the play itself had been recorded. The spinmeister media then said, ‘Aha! What is she hiding?’”
To make matters worse, hard-right internet commentator Andrew Breitbart, seeing the red-baiting possibilities of the Obama-Alinsky connection, took the story and ran with it. It was Breitbart who really engineered the bogus Alinskygate “scandal,” writing a paranoid hit piece headlined “Obama Ally Won’t Release Alinsky Tape.” The forty-three-year-old Breitbart then had a fatal heart attack, leaving a hysterical blog posting about the dire significance of a largely forgotten play produced in a storefront Chicago theater as his absurd epitaph.
“That’s when my life turned upside-down,” says Dickler. “Sean Hannity picked up the ball and accused me of protecting Obama by refusing to hand over the one thing that would have revealed him as a communist who shouldn’t be trusted to be president.” Likely on the advice of his lawyers, Hannity never mentioned Dickler by name, and some of his followers came to refer to her as the “treasonous Obamabot.”
However, some of Hannity’s more enthusiastic followers did figure out the identity of this woman who, in their fevered imagination, was hiding vital evidence of the first Black president’s pinko disloyalty.
“It was tremendously scary,” says Dickler. “Online, people were saying things like ‘I know where you work, I know where you live.’ They harassed my parents in Pennsylvania. They called my boss, demanding he fire me. I stayed off social media and became afraid to leave the theater in New York where I was working late at night, alone. All of this because fourteen years earlier, my brother-in-law had said, ‘Can I send you a play?’ It still boggles my mind.”
Perhaps the high point, or rather low point, of the craziness was when Dickler ended up on a right-wing “Scoundrels List”—a roster of the top two-hundred people who most influenced Barack Obama. “I’m Number 151,” Dickler states with irony-inflected pride. “I’m above Derrick Bell, the creator of critical race theory.”
Fortunately, things cooled off soon after in 2012, as crackpot attention shifted to other, newer shiny objects. “They moved on and I moved on,” notes Dickler. “But the show talks about what it felt like. It’s a little like how in museums they use beetles to clean off animal and bird bones. When the bugs finally get all the meat, they scatter.”
The Alinsky-Obama story would crop up again occasionally for several years, but not in a focused way, according to Dickler: “Most of the attack blogs are gone now, and it’s my website that comes up first on search engines. Really, this is a cautionary story about life on the internet—and part of what I learned is the need to be in control. By creating my website, I took ownership of my story.”
Although “I Killed Andy Breitbart” concerns events that occurred thirteen and twenty-seven years ago, Dickler sees her tale as more urgent and relevant than ever. Andrew Breitbart, pioneering online hatemonger, may be long gone, but Breitbart.com is still very much with us, peddling its alt-right disinformation. The website gave us Steve Bannon, who in turn gifted us with Donald Trump. And of course siloed social media platforms of all types and agendas continue to shape, define and fragment the body politic.
“My play is about the power of the Internet, how we’re all in bubbles, trusting what’s inside the bubble, distrusting what’s outside,” says Dickler. “If Kamala Harris had won in 2024, I wouldn’t feel it was necessary to do this show now. But she didn’t, and now it’s like all our stories are being banned or rewritten—even the country’s own story is being rewritten. This is a funny show, but it’s also a timely one, a reflection on the insane reality we’re living through right now. It’s important that we share our stories before they’re deleted.”
Dickler observes that theater, unlike so many forms of culture today, is a shared, communal experience—which in itself helps burst those isolating mental bubbles foisted upon us by technology. In a cyclical twist, a tale that began with a theatrical production in 1998 about grassroots, face-to-face democratic activism in the pre-internet age ends with another live stage presentation about the top-down electronic manipulation that characterizes our own time. “Breitbart” will give us the chance to see whether we’ve learned anything in the interim.
“I Killed Andy Breitbart” runs September 6-7 at the Apollo Theater Studio, 2550 North Lincoln. Tickets are $20; $15 for students. For more information, visit pamdickler.com.
