Colombian Peace Accords, Hate Group Refugees, and TikTok Deep Fakes — How a Show Evolves
When people ask me how I decide what to write about in my plays, I tell them I’m curious about something, and then the research leads me.
Last month, on a warm, brilliant Fall day, I was on a bench eating ice cream with my family. An older man sat down next to me eating an ice cream as well. His clothes were dirty and he had bandages on his face. I thought he might be homeless. I turned to him and said, “I guess this is the bench for eating ice cream?” He smiled and took a bite and said in a Scottish brogue, “You can do anything you like. I made this bench. And I made the one before it in ‘78.”
Turns out he’s a Scottish ex-techie turned free-spirit itinerant handyman named Jamie. He traded shooting lasers in a lab in Palo Alto in the ’70s for a life living off the land. He is now melting away from skin cancer and can’t get treatment because he’s not an American citizen.
But for two hours on that bench Jamie told me about growing up in stone houses in Scotland. About seeing the stone structures of Machu Pichu in pictures books as a child and knowing he wanted to come to America. That he read so much about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, that he went to Idaho, and ended up meeting Chief Joseph’s great grandson David. David liked Jamie’s care-free, unpretentious vibe so much he asked him to help build structures for pow-wow grounds on land they had recently bought back. So Jamie stayed for a year, and did just that. (And that was only part of his story).
I was entranced by Jamie’s gentleness, his soft-spoken humility, and because I had just set my mind to creating a new show about reconciliation, healing, and peacemaking. Here was this quiet, humble old Scottish guy telling me about the relationships he’s built with Native American communities, way off the radar, and with a sense of gratitude and wonder of a small child. He might be the first character in my new show.
As I’ve learned over the years, that can be dangerous to predict. I often start out with one question or topic, and then it changes as the facts on the ground reveal themselves. The story and themes come out of the truths I find. It is directed and pointed, but not predetermined.
I spent most of September and October this year gathering contacts for a trip to South Africa. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation was a landmark event in its transition from apartheid. I’d visited South Africa twice in 2002 and 2006. It’s a fascinating, though tense, place. It seemed like the natural start for an exploration of reconciliation. I started connecting with civil society organizations involved in reconciliation and peace-building work in Cape Town and outside Johannesburg. It was a lot of work to cold-email people and create connections, but eventually I had a good roster of folks who were happy to receive me and help in my work.
But as I read more in books and in news accounts, it became clear that South Africa is in the throes of a crisis of kleptocratic government and infrastructural failure. I talked to a couple different South Africans who spoke of a “radical despair” about the current state of affairs. One email from an American academic who is a South Africa specialist said that reconciliation and the TRC was a distant memory for most South Africans. They were far too consumed by massive government corruption, load shedding, and inflationary economic crisis.
I could surely go to South Africa to glean insights about reconciliation, but to pursue that story would be soft-headed at best, and completely missing the point at worst.
It also made me drill down to what I was really looking for: how does a society, or a person, or a place, overcome seemingly unhealable fractures. How does someone or some place change?
I got a phone call from my friend Pop, in the Bronx, who told me about how for years he’s tried to keep peace on his block on 168th street in the Bronx, wedged as it is between Crip territory on 169th and Blood territory on 167th. He’s been begging me to make a character based on him for years, so perhaps this show that will happen.
I started researching people who have been caught up in violent white nationalist hate groups in the U.S. and how they got out. I talked to a former white nationalist skinhead who has spent the last twenty years trying to make amends to the communities he harmed while also supporting other young men transitioning out of hate groups. He explained it’s from “toxic shame” that a lot of young men get drawn to its opposite: “pride” as in “white pride.”
And I traded my ticket to South Africa for a trip to Colombia, a place that has been actively involved in a national Truth and Justice process after its brutal 50 year civil conflict. A place where there are still lots of obstacles of course, but there has been meaningful conflict transformation and a feeling of nascent hope. (I’ve already talked to some folks who think only half the country believes in the process…sound like somewhere familiar?)
Looming behind this show is of course our own country, riven by division like never before in my lifetime. We have burgeoning paramilitary groups (Oath Keepers, Proud Boys). We have a toxic political discourse that is often conducted in bad faith, incentivized by social media algorithms that aggressively reward hot-take outrage. And, we can’t even agree on the truth. Reading the newspaper today, an article about TikTok Deepfakes made me realize I need to burrow into that, and I reached out to UC Berkeley Professor who is a specialist on disinformation. I’ll be interviewing him later this month.
Point is, right now I’m a journalist, following a story, led by curiosity. Later I will be a writer, trying to weave together the different strands of what I find. And then bring it to life as an actor, informed by all this on the ground research. I don’t know where this will take me, but I hope you will eventually come along for the ride with me.
