In spite of an emphatically bourgeois background, the Miser, as a youngster, fancied himself enough of an anarchist to scrawl the famous symbol of a capital A enclosed in a circle on his denim jacket in indelible black ink.

Subsequent efforts actually to understand anarchism revealed its philosophical depth and long history. Two of the more remarkable figures in that history are Emma Goldman, the Lithuanian-born anarchist writer, theorist and orator, and Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of the proto-anarchist philosopher William Godwin and author of the seminal feminist text “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Had they met, Wollstonecraft and Goldman, born nearly 100 years apart, probably would have had much to talk about.

That tantalizing thought drives “Emma Meets Mary,” a play by the New York performer and playwright Lorna Lable. You can see it free this Saturday at the New York Public Library’s Bloomingdale branch on the Upper West Side. Set in a sort of heaven for radicals, the show is a lighthearted take on a fictional duel between two serious and influential minds.

(Saturday at 2 p.m., 150 West 100th Street, Manhattan; 212-222-8030, nypl.org.)

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