Art mirrors politically polarized life
The Assembly: Episode 1 attempts to put the broken pieces of 21st-century political discourse back together
Can’t stand the polarization of public dialogue these days? This theatre piece isn’t going to make you feel better.
That’s the upshot of a conversation I had with two media professionals, Jesse Brown and Jesse Kline, following a preview performance of The Assembly: Episode 1, the latest documentary theatre collaboration between Montreal’s Porte Parole Productions and Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre (be warned there are spoilers in what follows).
The show’s co-authors, Alex Ivanovici, Annabel Soutar and Brett Watson, spent a year interviewing Donald Trump supporters in the U.S. during the last election primaries and found themselves repeatedly butting up against the liberal/ conservative ideological divide.
The Assembly is an attempt, in the companies’ words, to “put the broken and polarized pieces of 21st-century political discourse back together again in the theatre.”
They brought together Canadians with diverging political convictions, recorded conversations between them, and the first part of the show consists of professional actors re-enacting that conversation.
After about an hour of their exchange, the stage is turned over to six self-selecting audience members to talk about whatever they want to; and a coda recreates an exchange between Ivanovici, Watson and an American couple whose Trump-influenced views on immigration have shifted since the election.
The companies are preparing a second episode in French ( L’Assemblée), which will play in Montreal next month alongside Episode 1, and a third episode will follow next year in Maryland with American actors playing American interviewees.
Our response to the show mirrors it through a dialogue between individuals with differing political viewpoints (and we opted not to include a star rating as we’re talking about content rather than esthetics).
Kline is an editor at the Canadian Jewish News, a former columnist and comment editor at the National Post, and identifies as libertarian. Brown is the publisher of the podcast/news organization Canadaland and, while he doesn’t self-identify with any political position, many associate Canadaland and Brown with progressive views. Neither is a regular theatregoer. Both men reached for metaphors to describe the show. For Kline, “it seemed like … a university seminar course with a few more conservatives. You know, Thanksgiving dinner with your racist uncle. I can’t say that there was anything in there that I’ve never heard somebody express before.”
Brown chose even stronger words: “It was like the worst dinner party ever. And I’m not trashing the play, because that’s sort of every dinner party now. Very dumb politics have hijacked our every conversation and it’s inescapable … It’s just sort of like a statement of ‘I’m about this’ and the other person says ‘Well, I’m about this.’ And then you can speechify at each other.”
They’re referring specifically to the show’s first section, in which the ultra-conservative Valerie Price (played by Tanja Jacobs) locks horns with Shayne (Jimmy Blais), who identifies as queer, Jewish and an anarchist.
The two other participants — Hope (Ngozi Paul), an accountant with liberal views born in Jamaica, and James (Sean Colby) a conservative McGill undergraduate — struggle to make their views heard.
Says Kline, “I thought it was a pretty accurate microcosm of civil discourse nowadays in that they didn’t really discuss issues … Most of it was just mainly one character shutting down the discussion and another character getting so pissed off that she just walked out entirely, which is what often happens nowadays, unfortunately.”
Kline and I shared the view that the show engaged in meta-talk without really getting to the heart of any matter, but for Brown this was par for the course.
While people experiencing racism and Indigenous people struggling with lack of resources have “legitimate issues,” Brown says, for “the rest of us … it’s just completely abstract … There’s just so much shadowboxing and so much mimicking of what America has decided are issues.”
While the production aspires to open up dialogue between people with different viewpoints, Kline expects that the audience is going to come mostly from the left: “You do things like this, you’re always preaching to the choir because you’re getting out the people that are probably going to agree anyways and that’s the reason they’re shelling out the money to get a ticket. Can you get people from the other side in? Maybe. I don’t know how.”
Brown and Kline butted heads when our conversation moved into bigger-picture questions of economics, cued by a comment by a participating audience member that everything comes back to money.
Brown thinks that the redistribution of wealth post-2008 has been so extreme as to constitute a “soft revolution” that has “destroyed the middle class.” Kline agrees that things are hard for the middle class as the result of “a lot of bad government policy over the years,” but believes it’s still possible “to move up the social ladder.”
Brown believes we’re experiencing the destruction of a narrative of progress and aspiration, an “existential crisis that this play is about. The social contract has been broken.” Many of the audience members who took the stage in the play’s second section expressed sadness about what they’d seen in the first. Kline says the play didn’t make him sad, “but maybe I’m jaded.”
For Brown, it was “an aggressively frustrating experience” that was nonetheless “a very accurate reflection of our current moment.”
The Assembly: Episode 1 is at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave., until Nov. 3. See crowstheatre.com or call 647-341-7390 for information. Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2