Enemy within

Naomi Wallace is a dangerous woman. At least, the Homeland Security Department of the US government seems worried that she might be. She is certainly a fearless one - not only in her writing, with plays such as In the Heart of America, set during the first Gulf war - but also in her personal stand against what she sees as injustice and the peeling away of democratic rights.

Born and raised in Kentucky, now resident in Yorkshire, Wallace recently took the "travel challenge", in which people with US passports defy the US's prohibition on travel between it and Cuba, and make no attempt to hide the fact they've just visited Fidel Castro's communist outpost.

Arriving back from a trip to Cuba via Dallas, Wallace was held for four hours and questioned about her perceived communist sympathies. Doodles of a knife made by her teenage daughter in a notebook were cited as evidence that Wallace might pose a serious threat to the president.

"We know everything about you," boasted one official. "We looked you up on Wikipedia." Wallace tilts back her head and laughs at the thought that Wikipedia is the US government's major source of information on its citizens, the first line of defence in its "war on terror".

If those officials had read one of Wallace's plays, they might have been even more concerned. For Wallace is that unfashionable thing - a deeply political US playwright who unashamedly writes about ideas rather than feelings.

In a string of dramas including One Flea Spare, Slaughter City and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Wallace has written about class, oppression, alienation and exploration in poetic, sensual language; watching one of these plays is like being stroked by Karl Marx.

The tension is always between the social forces of history and people's everyday lives, between the apparently unstoppable power of the state and the imaginative acts of individuals.

As Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, says: "Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe that the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire."

"I am an optimist, an angry optimist," says Wallace. "The small things we can all do; that's enough for me. I don't look for goals or wins; my history is longer than that."

Set in the deep south during the Depression, Wallace's latest play, Things of Dry Hours, which opens at the Royal Exchange Manchester this week, is no less fierce than previous dramas.

It takes its title from Gwendolyn Brooks's poem, its inspiration from Robin Kelley's Hammer and Hoe (a history of the Alabama Communist party in the 1930s) and its epitaph from James Baldwin's comment: "As long as you think you're white, there's no hope for you."

Things of Dry Hours is set in a log cabin where the lives of unemployed black labourer Tice Hogan - a man who lives by the Bible and the Communist Manifesto - and his widowed daughter Cali are changed for ever by a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Based on five years of research, it is a play that unearths a forgotten part of US history: when poor blacks came together to found an indigenous American Communist party, a move that could have led to a different and better America.

Guardian Unlimited