If you attended the last mainstage production at the Milwaukee Rep, you may have been surprised at the end. When the play concluded, the Rep hosted tough conversations with audience members about the subject matter.
For decades, audience members have been able to chat with the Rep's cast before or after some performances. But now the team is breaking new ground, according to director of community engagement, Leda Hoffman.
"Milwaukee Rep is embarking on a new mission to really use the plays on our stage to provoke the conversations Milwaukee needs to have," Hoffman says.
The first conversation centered on American Song, the play that just ended. It's a one-man show about a father who's struggling to figure out what went wrong with his teenage son. The father shares that the boy fatally shot a number of classmates, then turned the gun on himself.
The Rep's artistic director Mark Clements commissioned the play to examine acts of violence.
"I want to know why it's happening in this country. I want to understand it. I want to see if I can help that and change that. And if in a tiny, tiny way as a theater-maker, with that privilege, it feels like I have to do something, where we produce plays that are entertaining but that (also) trigger deeper conversation," Clements says.
To prompt deeper conversations, the Rep invited a different guest on stage each night immediately after the curtain call to offer a five-minute reflection. One was a high schooler, Lonnae Hickman. She focused on the role gun violence plays in many people's everyday lives.
"I remember talking to my mom on the phone and she said, 'Lonnae, school is closed tomorrow because of a gun threat.' And the first thing that came out of my mouth was: 'Wow. Great. Now I don't have to study for that big test,'" Hickman says.
Hickman says after making the flip comment she realized that she should take the threat of gun violence seriously. But she says that's hard, given that it’s so commonplace. Hickman asked, "Have mass shootings become such a normal routine that we just don't care anymore?"
Another speaker picked up on the play's exploration of mental illness. Psychotherapist Dan Bird says media coverage of mass shootings sensationalizes devastating impacts of depression or suicide. Yet Bird says millions of people battling mental illness are successfully treated.
"As we reflect on this story that we just saw, I believe it's important to remember that individuals are suffering all around us. Statistics tell us that anywhere from 20-25 percent of people will suffer from depression or other mental health issues in their lifetime. I invite you to look around. The first row (has) 24 seats. That means 5-6 people in that section who experience depression or other mental health issues in their life," Bird says.
Organizers recorded the speeches and posted them online, so anyone can check them out and continue the conversation. On one night, a speaker promoted gun control; after another performance, a speaker promoted gun ownership.
At the end of each five-minute speech as audience members filed out of the theater, they were asked to join small discussion groups in the lobby. The conversations were run by trained facilitators from the FrankZeidlerCenter for Public Discussion.
Wayne Marik of Racine says he was hesitant at first.
"In the beginning I didn't anticipate staying. But as the play went on, I thought about it a little bit more and became intrigued with the idea," Marik says.
Marik was one of about 3,000 audience members who stuck around for the discussion circles throughout the play's run. He says he took a lot from the experience, including the awareness that violence can happen to anyone.
"That was very valuable just to sort of pique a person's senses of awareness of the problems, but then also to maybe get them thinking about, 'OK, if it is that close to me and my everyday life, is there something that I can get involved in, or something that I can participate in to try to try to address the problem, even though it may not be something that we're going to be able to solve?'"
Marik says everyone in his group commented that they'd like to participate in similar discussions after other plays. It could happen. Leda Hoffman, director of community engagement, says the Rep plans to continue such dialogues in its next season, when it puts on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced.
"It's a play all about identity, all about people with various different religious, ethnic, racial identities coming together at a dinner party and having to work out what that means. And it's a very exciting, dynamic play that people are going have a lot of thoughts about afterward. So we're in conversations about how we can take that play as a jumping off point, again, to find commonalities among people," Hoffman says.
Hoffman says the Rep is still figuring out what shape conversations could take, and what the Rep's role might be after they end. She says ultimately, if audience members are moved by what they discover, it’s up to them to decide whether to run with it.
