Collaborative Theatre for the Courageous
- Rebecca Burnham
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Collaboration across all sorts of divides is one of Summit Stages’ core commitments. It’s key to our building the Beloved Community. But is it really feasible? What about divides that are so profound that sometimes, it doesn’t even seem like you and your collaborator live in the same reality? How do you tell a shared story when both of you want it to end differently? How do you keep the creative juices flowing with a collaborator whose views are sometimes downright offensive to you? And if you actually manage to tell a story that works for both of you, will it retain any capacity to touch the audience?
If anyone can answer those questions, it would be Mark Metzger, 28, who leads the Braver Arts program at Braver Angels, an American organization that’s been restoring goodwill between reds and blues since 2016. Mark joined up during the COVID-19 epidemic, both because his work at Broadway had come to a screeching halt, and because he was deeply troubled about the polarization of American politics. He’d grown up surrounded by extended family that were deeply committed on both sides of the political fence. He’d always treasured friendships with people who saw things differently than he did. So when he witnessed friendships and even family relationships falling apart over politics, he felt an urgency about finding a way to help America depolarize. That’s when he heard about Braver Angels and wound up serving on the convention team.
“Conventions are a lot like producing a play,” he says. “There’s all those moving parts.” He was surprised when one of the organizers asked him to create a play for their 2023 convention in Gettysburg. They saw theatre as a powerful form of storytelling with tremendous potential for reaching audiences.
Mark started by holding discussions with a wide variety of Braver Angels members, red and blue, black and white, gay and straight, young and old. They talked about their ancestors who’d served in the military, including on both sides of the Civil War. They discussed the watershed events of their own lifetimes, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the pandemic lockdowns and vaccination controversies. They had opposing perspectives on just about everything but one issue – the threat that political polarization and social fragmentation posed to a peaceful future.
He then crafted those conversations into a play. It was set at the Braver Angels Alliance in Gettysburg, on Remembrance Day. The cast of 23 performers represented BA members, gathering to honor and preserve their family legacies, in case a recent spate of civil unrest broke out into all-out war. They didn’t agree. Their disagreements were sometimes deep, painful and perplexing. But they held space for each other and celebrated their common humanity, even as battle sounds approached. The message was clear: If we cannot learn to listen to and care about each other across our differences, the bloodshed of our past will also be our future.
The Braver Angels people whose stories had been written into the play were the ones who performed it at the convention. It was deeply impactful for the cast and the audience. Then a convention attendee invited Mark to collaborate with New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), where they have been running Mind the Gap, a program to bridge a generational divide, for years. Could they adapt the program to bridge political divides as well?
They put it to the test at the 2024 convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where seventeen Braver Angels volunteers, ages 14-92, came a few days early in order to create a BA-style Mind the Gap production. The organizers (three from BA and two from NYTW) took care to ensure a balance between reds, blues and others among the group. Whether or not they had previous theatrical experience was not an issue. They just needed to be willing to engage courageously.
The first day, they played theatre games and did trust building exercises. Then, they split up into pairs that leaned differently politically. They were assigned a task, such as to create a poem, movement, monologue or scene about a specific issue, like how your political opposites view you, or perspectives on abortion. They had just a few minutes to interview each other and create a response, and then they performed what they came up with for the group. The time crunch was important, because it pushed them to lean on instinctive responses rather than allowing them to get too much into their heads. Then, the pairs would rotate, they’d get a new prompt, and repeat the process with a new task.
Over three days, the participants created upwards of 80 theatrical moments. Then the facilitators gathered all that material together, sorted through the moments, and turned it into a loose storyline about a family gathering for a reunion, hashing out their political differences, and deciding they wanted to belong to each other regardless of where they stood on all the issues. The facilitators didn’t add any new dialogue. Every word and choreographed movement, (from an acrimonious tug-of-war between reds and blues to a poignant monologue about losing a precious childhood friendship to ethnic conflict) came from the moments created by the participants. Their first rehearsal was just hours before they were to perform for convention attendees.
The whole experience was nerve-wracking, because the prompts brought up intense emotions about issues that mattered deeply to the participants. “There was anger and rage,” one of them later recalled. “We were in touch with the entire rainbow. And it was through the creative tension and the container that the workshop gave us that we could work through it.”
Another said, “A lot of the week it felt like: is this going to explode in 5000 different directions?”
But, as another participant explained, “They have a tremendously sophisticated and well-developed methodology for doing this and bringing it out and keeping it peaceful.”
The intensity and the anxiety about whether it was going to pull together was an indicator that what was happening was real. “It’s supposed to feel like free-falling.” Mark explains. “If it doesn’t, you’re not doing it right.”
The impact of the cast experience and the performance was enormous. Cast and audience members were brought to tears. The point was not to change anybody’s views on the disputed issues, just their perspectives on each other. And it worked. After the performance, cast members shared what this had meant to them personally. One said, “I’ve been in theatre for a long time and this was one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Another marveled at the safe space the program created for them to share their views. “Being able to talk to each other without judgement is just amazing,” she said. “I don’t think there has been anywhere you can do that, except for here.” Participants rejoiced at the discovery that they could have a truly diverse group of friends. There were repeated expressions like, “This was the most meaningful week, probably of my entire life.”
And the impact didn’t end with the performance. Participant Catherine Clary later reported on what she carried home with her. “That week taught me how to have difficult conversations with people I love, how to feel safe speaking my beliefs, and how to be a better listener.”In February of this year, BA and NYTW took the program to Atlanta, Georgia. This time, they pared it down to a weekend experience, while maintaining a profound connection across divides that softened the hearts and brightened the hopes of participants and audience members alike.
They hope to take it across the nation. As convention cast member Kasper Rum declared “I really have faith that we can depolarize America. And I want everybody to be doing Mind the Gap, permanently, forever.”
For me, it’s exciting to learn that NYTW and BA are regularly empowering people to collaborate courageously across divides in a way that knits their hearts together, despite their differences. One of my pressing goals for Summit Stages is to pull together an intensive, collaborative workshop where composers, lyricists and librettists can hone the craft of musical-writing together, across the divides that get in the way of our truly seeing each other. It’s an important step toward building a brand that’s an alternative to Broadway’s, not conservative to Broadway’s liberal but rather, inclusive, cohesive, and unifying, as well as inspiring. That’s how we’ll build the Beloved Community.
Sometimes, when I talk about that, people get a wistful look in their eyes and ask, “Do you think that’s really possible?” Of course it is: Mind the Gap proves it. I see beautiful opportunities to work together with organizations like Braver Angels and NYTW on the not-too distant horizon. Meanwhile, Braver Angels is offering an online training on how to write songs that bridge divides on May 3rd. You can learn more about that opportunity here. Skilled songwriters who’d be interested in taking that training to the next level, in order to lead Common Ground Songwriting Workshops, can sign up here.
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