In Paterson, NJ, 1913, America's premiere city for manufacturing silk, workers are on strike but the newspapers refuse to give them any coverage. Finances are running low, many workers have to send their children off to live with sympathetic strangers.

Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village, a thriving sub-culture is gathering steam. IWW organizers, led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, team up with Village artists and intellectuals, including journalist John Reed, arts patron Mabel Dodge and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, to try to gain more support for the strikers.

The result is The Paterson Pageant-- a show about the strike, staged for one night only at the old Madison Square Garden, directed by Reed, designed by Robert Edmund Jones and performed by a thousand silk workers whose march from the ferry to midtown gathers thousands of supporters.

There’s a full house, the show is a hit, but to many, it didn’t help the cause at all as the strike comes to a close with most demands unmet. Still, those who were present got a taste of how theatre in community can be a force for change.