I was talking to Artscope Magazine’s editor, Brian Goslow, about my play “IMPOSSIBLE?” a story of what happens to friends in a small New England town when a tyrannical president takes over the nation, and he asked me to write a piece about it. I call it a guerilla theater recorded Zoom performance. Because of my lack of any production budget, this is an inexpensive way to get a play up and out there. I gathered actors, gave them visual backgrounds to use to set scenes, my editor put the scenes together and there’s even a bit of music and sound effects.
The point that I wanted to make with the film was to wake people, our people, people on the left who are asleep, not aware of how we are in a rising autocracy. Because for every Adam Schiff or Jamie Raskin or Bernie Sanders or AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), or even the hundreds of thousands who have rallied for Hands Off — there are still millions of sleep walkers, caught in the fog of disbelief, that a dictator can’t happen here, not realizing that human beings are being disappeared, due process and law is scorned, safety nets are ripped apart, science degraded, workers treated like garbage, children and seniors viewed as disposable.
The folks on the Trump side aren’t going to watch the play, but if they do, they will see one of the characters who’s pretty much like them. He’s a farmer, Eldredge Landon, part Yankee, part Cape Verdean, who is friends with our reluctant hero, alternative radio station manager, Dave O’Sulley.