“What’s keeping me sane is not winning debates,” Michael Rohd says. “It’s imagining futures.”
“In 2008, the conversation of ‘The Race’ was about what a leader looks like,” says Derek Goldman, the lab’s co-director and chairman of performing arts at Georgetown. “Almost by definition this time, this moment is about the system, and who it serves.”
More than a decade ago, “The Race” was in the vanguard of an effort by theater makers to engage audiences collaboratively in discourse on issues of the day. The practice has become far more prevalent: Witness the Broadway success of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in which Heidi Schreck invites the audience to vote nightly on the results of a debate on the document between her and a teenage student. (It’s now on Amazon Prime, in a filmed version directed splendidly by Marielle Heller.)
“The Race” in 2008 — and in some iterations around the country in subsequent election cycles — gathered spectators in theaters to explore their views of participatory democracy, partly through improvisatory skits: One feature was “Presidential Speech Karaoke,” in which audience members volunteered to stand and read portions aloud of actual candidate speeches off teleprompters. Initially, the plan was to revive the in-person format for the new Georgetown version, but covid-19 scuttled that proposal, as it has hundreds of other live theater events.
The fallback is this online version, in which five actors from the original production, who were Georgetown undergraduates in 2008, plus eight current students, lead viewers through some dramatized playlets. It’s all in service of prompting civil dialogue. “This is an adaptive vision to sort of say, ‘What can we do that is meaningful in this moment to rekindle what made ‘The Race 2008’ exciting?” Goldman says. Rohd adds: “The goal of the show is for people to be open to having a conversation about things they may disagree on publicly.”
Another element will incorporate remote contributions from six of the lab’s international theater fellows — from Vietnam, South Africa, Mexico and other places — to generate talk about a subject Americans rarely consider: how the rest of the world sees the race for the presidency. “I got to spend three hours talking with them,” Rohd says of the fellows, who will lead groups of the audience in virtual breakout-room discussions. “I asked: ‘As folks not living in the U.S., what do you wish we were thinking about in this country?’ ”
The experience of collectively contemplating the impact of an election can be moving, and agonizing, Rohd says. Four years ago, he staged an eight-hour election-night version of “The Race” at Arizona State University, where he teaches civic practice and theater. Bulletins from CNN appeared on a jumbotron, and the participants watched as the early indications of a victory by Hillary Clinton shifted to ever-clearer signs of Donald Trump’s win. For Clinton partisans, Rohd recalls, the event took on a searing, stunning sense of what in a democracy could go wrong.
On this occasion, Goldman observes, the tenor of the conversation is apt to be wildly different from it was in 2008, when the country was on the verge of selecting its first Black president. The mood was predominantly one of hope back then; this time, it would be fair to assume that those who enter “The Race” will be in a far more worried state about the fate of American democracy. (Some 130 theatergoers will have the ability in the Zoom webinar format to participate directly in the discussions; all others signing up will be able to simply watch.)
The means by which voters communicate have changed a lot since 2008, certainly in terms of the prevalence and power of social media. Rohd argues, though, that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have not supplanted theater as the most dynamic method of sharing stories and expanding minds. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find people who say they collaborate and imagine through social media,” Rohd says. “We don’t have enough civic spaces in this nation in this moment — and haven’t for a long time — where we can gather and imagine together.”
Correction: A previous version of this story said “The Race” actors would lead viewers through dramatized playlets including an excerpt from Sophocles’s “Antigone.” “Antigone” will not be included in the production.
The Race, presented by Sojourn Theater and Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Tuesday at 5 p.m. Admission is free. https://bit.ly/2FGdf7Q