I received an e-mail from one of my colleagues at Minnesota State University-Mankato just yesterday, and couldn’t help but think of the current Office Hours episode in which our own illustrious Sarah Shannon (who seems to conjure more hours in the day than most) interviewed Walker Art Center curator Bartholomew Ryan about the recent “Baby Marx” run at the Walker (you can listen to the interview here or check out more on the Baby Marx project, including video of Baby Marx visiting Occupy Wall Street, here). Still, what Steve Buechler was writing about was actually the  one-man play “Marx in Soho,” written by Howard Zinn and currently being performed by Bob Weick in conjunction with Iron Age Theatre. Steve’s got a performance of the play scheduled–mark your calendars–for the MSU-Mankato campus on Oct. 23, 2012, and is hoping to both get the word out and let everyone know that, if you’d like to see Weick take the stage and bring Marx to your Minnesota (or Midwest) community, this is a great chance.

Writing about the production for the Iron Age website, Steve said in 2007: “This production does several different things with great skill, subtlety, and professionalism. The audience will encounter a Marx who remains passionate about injustice, critical of inequality, and combative with his rivals… but also a Marx who is loving toward his family, saddened by their poverty, and willing to rethink some of his ideas. Bob Weick is a gem of a performer, taking the audience on a whirlwind tour of different moods, attitudes, and ideas. Whether you’re a novice undergraduate, a Marxist scholar, a social justice advocate, or an interested citizen, you will find much of value in this production.” Steve can be contacted at steve.buechler@mnsu.edu.

Finally, in one last Marxist moment, I’d like to point readers to author Mary Gabriel’s new Hachette tome, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. While I haven’t tucked in, our associate editor Letta Page has been delighted thus far and seems pretty close to adding it to her list of exemplary books for social scientists who hope to reach public audiences (and be explicable to those audiences at the same time).