a feeling of justice

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer..." 

Robert F. Kennedy

I am having trouble putting words together this week, and it is not just because I have been spending all my waking moments in front of my computer, working on a final production draft for Somewhere Safer, crafting the last few pieces of the play’s puzzle.

It is because this week and the week before that have been, in my personal political sphere, explosive weeks.  I have learned a lot about the practical aspects of the American judicial system and the inner workings of state legislatures. I have burned up with anger and felt the bottom of my stomach drop with sadness, and through it all I have endeavored to stay focused on the work at hand, the work of making a play, because it was something I could do, and keep doing, and it was a way to put humanity back into the world, back into an exploration of an unjust system.

One of the questions at the core of Somewhere Safer that I have been thinking a lot about this week: at what point do we give up our humanity? At what point are we so attached to ideology, to being right about what we believe, that we fail to see that at the center of every system and every principle is a lonely human struggle?

At the core of these struggles this week, in Texas, in Florida, in Ohio, in North Carolina, I found hope in the human mess that came out in response, swinging their hearts in their hands, opening their mouths, exercising their rights as American citizens to take up space in their own government.  When we stand, shoulder to shoulder, with other humans, we locate  our own struggle, our own lives, our own hearts, in a larger, bigger fight. We become a  body made up of bodies, thinking, feeling, bodies, fragile and sad and joyful, holding up history with our own two hands.

Somewhere Safer opens August 11th at the NYC International Fringe Festival. You can contribute to the play here and read a preview with Lauren here. 

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.