To Start With (by lauren)

This week we launch our IndieGoGo campaign for the NYCFringe production of Somewhere Safer, beginning the long uphill climb toward making the play a reality. As we’ve been in casting meetings for the last week and a half with curious actors, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on how the play came to be – what the impetus was for writing it, why the play matters.

People are often surprised to learn, given my own liberal leanings, that the first character to inhabit the SoSa world was the ultra-conservative news-machine CEO Bill Mathers, semi-truthfully mouthing off about the French Revolution.  (Watch a shortened version of his speech here). Bill came out roaring sometime during the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011, and the play never looked back.

Before Somewhere Safer, I shied away from writing about political issues and told myself it was primarily because I was not qualified to talk about politics and had little to contribute to the conversation.  The truth, though, was that I kept quiet because quiet people cannot be wrong. By having no opinion, I could appear as though I was above the whole fracas. This, it seems to me, now is how apathy is born: a deep-seated fear of having an opinion.  It is easier to sit above the fray and be quiet than to be publicly castigated for one’s missteps.

That summer, though, I began to feel that whether I knew what I was talking about or not  I could no longer afford to be apolitical in my work. Too many of the day-to-day problems I faced and interactions I had were intimately connected with questioning what it meant to be a citizen in America. My daily struggle as a low-paid, often no-paid artist with a huge debt burden from college.  My friends being out of work and uninsured. My schoolteacher friends who had their young students locked into classrooms, frisked in the hallways, prepared not for a life of success but for a life of imprisonment.  Every day I was faced with the ever-widening distance between the grand vision of America and the people who inhabited it. So I relinquished my silence, and I wrote a play.

I think now, two years later, there is nothing as American as using my voice in this way. My voice exists outside of money, outside of power, outside of the influence a name or a job can win me.

I am not talking about the act of speaking; plenty of people in our government do that, and yet the voice they speak with is not their own: it is the voice of special interests, corporations, re-election. There is no honesty in it, and asks nothing of them, ideologically or personally.

I mean the act of voicing what you believe is right, even though the cost may be high, and you may be wrong, and your side may lose, over and over again.

The characters of Somewhere Safer struggle with this dilemma, as each of us do. They struggle against fear and prejudice, they struggle for independence, and they hope, as I do, that their struggle will provoke a thoughtful examination of our own role as citizens in an American society.

Our IndieGoGo campaign is live. Please donate and share to help bring the play to life.