Amy Herzog reflects on creating the characters at the heart of 4000 Miles.

The character ‘Vera’ in 4000 Miles is based on my grandmother, Leepee Joseph, who died in 2013. In the play, Vera’s grandson, Leo, refers to her as a “card-carrying” communist, but that was not quite true of Leepee – her Communist Party membership was revoked in the 1930s in an episode she still found too painful to talk about fifty years later. Two different stories have circulated in my family explaining her expulsion from CPUSA:  

1) Leepee was outspoken about her disagreement with the Party’s plan to infiltrate the National Guard. Dissent was not tolerated in the party.  

2) The head of Leepee’s local chapter of CPUSA made a pass at her and she rejected him. He revoked her membership as revenge.  

I find both of these stories to be plausible based on the woman I knew as my grandmother.  

The youngest of four daughters of Jewish immigrants, Leepee was arrested for civil disobedience for the first time when she was twelve years old. She dropped out of school at sixteen to join the workforce as a secretary in the theatre division of the Works Progress Administration, where she earned the nickname “Junior Longshoreman” for her flat shoes, lack of makeup and foul mouth. She was congenitally incapable of keeping her disapproval to herself, as any of my aunts, uncles, cousins or parents could attest (I can hear her criticising these sentences as I write them). There was never a chance that Leepee would sit quietly while Party leaders presented a plan she thought would backfire. It would not surprise me at all if, in making her case, she’d used the word “stupid.”  

And then, Leepee was a heartbreaker. I was aware even as a young child that I had a very sexy grandma, a green-eyed, sly, funny and curvy grandma who’d long ago had an affair with the movie star John Garfield. Laughing darkly, she used to tell me about all the men whose advances she’d had to fend off -- the father of the family she babysat for when she was fourteen, her stepson from her first marriage when she was forty, her landlord in the years before she died. I never found these stories funny, but perhaps her sense of humour was a survival tool. I could imagine her laughing while trying to physically evade some smitten local Party official trying to It’s possible that both stories are true, and anyway, they’re the same story: a self-assured, independent woman didn’t bow to a man in power and she paid for it. How did this idealistic leftist and feminist reconcile the cruelty, the misogyny of the authoritarian Party with her lifelong devotion to the principles it represented? When confronted with atrocities perpetrated by communist regimes, Leepee would respond with that most unsettling of leftist sayings: “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” As though she hadn’t been one of the eggs.  

More and more I understand it this way: her disdain for organised religion notwithstanding, Leepee had a fundamentally devotional temperament. She needed to believe in something larger than her own life, and to live in service of a good that would outlast her. Her faith in Communism didn’t just survive her unjust expulsion from the party – it survived the revelation that the Soviet Union was one of the bloodiest experiments in history, as well as the Cultural Revolution in China and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.  

During the Bush and Obama years, my grandmother watched in dismay as income inequality ballooned in the US, as investment bankers and Russian oligarchs moved into her neighborhood, as many of her grandchildren drifted away from the family’s Marxist values. She lived long enough to march in the protests at Occupy Wall Street, carrying a sign that read “Tax the #@&%-ing Rich.” I’m glad she got to chant old familiar slogans with young people taking up the mantle of socialism, and gladder that she never had to see Capitalism Incarnate move into the White House -- twice. In the years before she died, she saw two plays I’d written about her premiere in New York. “Well, you’re certainly creative,” she told me with great love. “It’s too bad that ultimately, you’re a reactionary.”