Theatre Reviews & Features 
Matthew Lieff Christan in Jeff Britting’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Photos by Carol Rosegg.
It's certainly darker than 867-5309 Jenny.
In Anthem, Jeff Britting's adaptation of Ayn Rand's same-name novella, a young man, Equality 7-2521, exists a dim and distorted dystopia devoid of individuality: the word "I," among other pronouns, is strictly verboten. It's a world illuminated by candlelight; technology is feared, fought and rationed. Unfortunately for him, Equality suffers from a threatening impulse called curiosity. Like so much else in this dystopia, curiosity is a crime.
Still, Equality capitulates to his impulse, stoking a sensation of wonder and discovery inside himself while inside an abandoned subway — a remainder of the Unmentioned Times that persisted before his own. There, Equality stumbles upon a relic known as electricity and is, well, electrified. Back above ground, he falls for Liberty 5-3000, a woman with whom he commits the "sin of preference." The sin of love.
Written originally as a play, Anthem took a long route to prominence — nearly a quarter-century between the summer of 1937, when Rand was a Soviet university student in the U.S. and pausing work on her breakthrough The Fountainhead, to 1961, when it was published in full on these freedom-loving shores.
