America: it can be a struggle to picture its image – baseball, eagles, apple pie; maybe guns, racism, Trump? Even America has had a problem imagining itself in the past.
On 1st May 1950 the ordinary town of Mosinee, Wisconsin woke up to something strange - soldiers, prison camps and red hammer and sickle flags.
To make sense of this the story is told as forensic documentary theatre. Three sharply dressed performers stand at microphones before a war room setting, map table and illuminated evidence cases. They have been digging through the records.
The inspiration for the event was a list of 57 unnamed alleged communists waved by anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, letting the audience imagine, seeing them everywhere. John A Decker of the American Legion saw this as an opportunity for an educational experience, a transformative intervention, allowing the people to picture what communism would look like in high definition.
Joseph Zack Kornfeder would provide the authenticity. A former “as red as you get” member of the Comintern. An outsider but is he a prophet, the Big Bad Wolf or Robin Hood? His plan is to work from within to create tension, to target weak and pressure points. Revolution starts in the home, and he coaches Decker, in a role different to his usual returning to “the little wife”, much to his wide-eyed perplexity.
In on the plot is Benjamin Gitlow another ex-communist who advocates an external show of force in a scripted pageant featuring arrests, book burnings and confiscation of weapons, designed for the media. With simmering tensions and jealousy, it’s a case of too many ex-communists spoil the broth. Kornfeder is reduced to a bit player but takes things into his own hands, to a possibly coincidental but very unfortunate outcome.
This is a smart debut production, performed with élan and artistically staged with the distinctive use of live video, models and sound design.
It doesn’t offer all the answers, the events not ending that coherently, viewed as serious or fun, messy and confusing. It does however hint at parallels, the capacity to make things up in the absence of facts and at the danger of letting authoritarians take control of the narrative, perhaps aided by disgruntled voters. To misquote Metternich “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold”.
Show times: 1 to 25 August (not 12, 19) 2024 at 3.30pm.
Tickets: £12 (£11) to £13 (£12)
Suitability: 14+