On May Day 1950, the people of Mosinee – a tiny town in Wisconsin – staged a bizarre pageant that essentially consisted of a fake communist uprising.
Three quarters of a century later, Brit company Counterfactual happened across this nugget and decided to craft a docu-theatre exploration of the eccentric Red Scare-era happening, which was given a further lurid twist by the fact two of the town grandees who had taken part – a priest and the mayor – died of heart attacks before the day was out.
Nikhil Vyas’s production – written by him and co-devised with the cast – makes atmospheric use of live video and has wonderfully menacing sound design from Patch Middleton. It is an undeniably intriguing premise. But I’m sorry to say the show is a mess.
Maybe it was my Fringe-fogged brain, but I constantly struggled to follow exactly what was going on. A bit of this is that – as the show states – there simply aren’t many good first-hand sources: there are a spread of relatively terse newspaper reports and a couple of archive interviews and that’s apparently it.
But as ‘The Mosinee Project’ is based around invented dialogue anyway I’m not sure a lack of detailed accounts should really matter when we do know for a fact that this happened. The show centres on fraught planning discussions between two townsfolk and a repentant communist agitator they’d enlisted, and Counterfactual do successfully milk it for a certain absurdist comedy. But to me it felt agonisingly lacking in lucidity: aside from the fact it was often quite hard to remember who everyone in the cast of three was meant to be at a given time, a total lack of explanation of the nuts and bolts of what was supposed to be going on in Mosinee made it frequently bewildering – concentrating on the psychodrama of the planners without very clearly explaining what was literally happening in the town.
There’s also the question of what the production is trying to say. There is discussion at the start of how intertwined our fate is with America’s. There is definitely more than a hint that some of the town leaders were impressed with aspects of communism. But none of this really adds up to anything. Some Americans did a weird thing 74 years ago and now Counterfactual have made a cool looking but unilluminating, sub-Breach Theatre attempt at explaining why. Truly I think it could be drastically improved with a script tweaked for clarity. For now, though, it’s a fascinating subject but an infuriating mess.