Philly Fringe 2026: Iron Age Theatre presents Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho

While the intimate, low-budget setting offers a surprisingly authentic town-hall atmosphere, the evening ultimately highlights how severely Zinn’s text has aged. In 2026, socialist politics are no longer an ideological relic; they are an active, winning electoral reality.

Weick proves a warm, thoroughly capable Marx who clearly knows the material inside out. His performance shifts fluidly between wistful nostalgia for the short-lived Paris Commune and thunderous fury when calling for workers to seize the means of production. In those high-energy passages, Weick taps into a genuine populist fire, bringing lived-in humanity to a figure so often flattened into an icon.

The trouble lies in Zinn’s script itself, which is laced with odd contradictions. Marx preaches the necessity of broad solidarity while simultaneously indulging in petty, hyper-niche historical feuds, like his endless grievances against the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Meanwhile, biographical detours regarding his wife, Jenny, fail to deepen our connection to the character, functioning more like dry background trivia than meaningful dramatic beats.

The show offers only token lip service to its Philadelphia setting, missing a clear opportunity for the kind of flexible, local adaptation that the Fringe thrives on. Deep End Studios in Gray’s Ferry, where the show ran September 22-24, provided a raw, immediate space that made director John Doyle’s production less like a play and more like a radical meeting (this production moves to North Philly’s Broken Mirror Studio for performances on September 26 and 27). Yet that very immediacy only heightens the friction between a live room and a static 1990s script.

Watching Marx defend his ideas against the charge of irrelevance feels completely out of step with current political realities. I would love to know what Marx thinks about building momentum in our Mamdani moment. The room felt alive, but the play itself remained frozen in time.

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