228: The Power of Theater in Fighting Gun Violence: A Conversation with Michael Cotey

How can theater become a powerful tool for activism, particularly in the fight against gun violence? Join us as we discuss this topic with our special guest, Michael Cotey, a theater director and the Artistic Director of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence. Inspired by young people, their experiences with gun violence, and their fight for change, we explore Michael's journey of developing the project and how theater can make space for marginalized groups that often don’t have a place in mainstream American theater.

Michael shares with us the process behind ENOUGH!, where youth playwrights create stories that explore gun violence and its many impacts. We discuss the importance of engaging in deeper conversations and promoting community action through these performances, becoming an effective tool for inspiring change.

You can access a reading of the plays here, as well as join a nationwide reading.

Further reading:
Young playwrights use the theater to confront the trauma of gun violence (PBS NewsHour)
ENOUGH! Seeks Short Anti-Gun Violence Plays From Teens (American Theatre)
How Theater Is Inspiring Social Justice for the Next Generation (Backstage)
Ghost Gun confronts class and race (Chicago Reader)

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

This is the legal disclaimer, where I tell you that the views, thoughts and opinion shared on this podcast belong solely to our guests and hosts and not necessarily Brady or Brady's affiliates. Please note this podcast contains discussions of violence that some people may find disturbing. It's okay, we find it disturbing too. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Red, blue and Brady. I'm one of your hosts, jj, and we're coming at you with episode three and, i'm sure, your safety series. We talk all about how media and storytelling and the arts can be combating gun violence. Today we're sitting down talking about how theater, in particular, can be an avenue for not just bringing folks together to talk about their own experiences with gun violence, but to be a force for gun violence prevention and social justice community work To do so. We're joined by Michael Cody of Enough Plays Against Gun Violence.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Thanks for having me. My name is Michael Cody. I am a theater director out of the Midwest, Primarily been in Chicago for the last eight years, and over the course of the last three years or so, since 2019, I've been working on this project. Enough Plays Against Gun Violence.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Well, and I'm wondering before we get in, we're going to talk a lot about Enough Plays Against Gun Violence, which I'm guessing we should just call Enough.

Speaker 2: 1:41

Sure that works.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Or for a full title.

Speaker 2: 1:43

I was going to say, yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful. We could call it Enough or Enough Plays, that's fine.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Enough Plays. I wonder if you can share how you moved from the long theater work that you've been involved in because if folks are going to Google you, they'll see that you've had a very impressive career How you moved into talking about gun violence and gun violence in all of its weird forms and aftermath. How did that start?

Speaker 2: 2:07

Well, it was a very concrete moment for me. I think for a lot of people, this issue is always lurking in the background, is something that you get infuriated about, you care about, you don't necessarily know how to contribute to changing things. That was the case for me. I think I was one of those people where things would pop up and I'd get incensed about why things weren't changing and never made sense to me. It seems fairly obvious that there's some things that could just be done about this issue, but that we were winding up in the same place. In fact, i was in a rehearsal hall when news about Parkland broke through. Someone had their phone up and it came in. It was kind of watching the same old movie again. Everyone got really upset about it. Everyone was really. It stopped rehearsal data in its tracks and then we kind of just kept going on with their business. That didn't really sit right with me. It was the third time I had been in rehearsal when the news of a mass shooting had come in. I sat there thinking what are we doing? What are we doing in this rehearsal hall if we're not somehow using this tool that we have to address this issue? That's when the brainstorming began Initially. The idea was we'll find some really well-known playwrights, award-winning playwrights, we'll get them the right short plays and we'll get them produced all around the country. I ran that idea by a mentor of mine by the name of Michael Rode. He's just brilliant in when it comes to theater and civic engagement. He said it's a nice idea, but those playwrights, they have a platform. If they want to address this issue, they can easily do it without any prodding from someone else.

Speaker 2: 4:12

This idea went on the back burner for a while, like how could we take theater and address gun violence? Then I saw what came out of Parkland. I saw teenagers and young people making everyone pay attention, doing the actual work that us grownups should be doing grownups and quotations. That was so inspiring. Columbine happened when I was in middle school. I do remember doing some lockdown drills, but not to the extent at which they're almost ubiquitous.

Speaker 2: 4:47

Now, with being a teenager, i became really curious. What is that experience like, when you feel like you have to march in the street and create giant nationwide organizations in order to stop people from getting killed by guns? Then in 2019, there were two back-to-back mass shootings over the course of the same weekend. I was like I feel like I've had this idea on the back burner. No one's gonna do it. You know, no one's. No one's gonna take my idea and do it. The only way to go out there and Start engaging with theater and on this issue is just to launch it. And you know that fall. I think I emailed every theater in the country.

Speaker 2: 5:41

And called in every favor that I had sort of accumulated over 10 years of being a theater professional And found a lot of people. In the three years since I started that product, this project, i found a lot of people who felt the same way, who felt like One we weren't doing enough about this issue in the theater, to that the theater is really underutilized tool for activism. And That three, we talk about marginalized groups all the time in the theater And how we want to make sure the stories we tell represent everybody in our communities. Well, marginalized group that we don't talk often enough about our young people. Young people kind of often have no place in American theater, unless it's, and you know, at your high school or theater for young audiences, which is usually great, but on the main stage in larger companies They're not making space for these voices. So as enough began to take shape, we were finding this Confluence of many things that we could accomplish with this one program.

Speaker 3: 6:50

So let's get into it a little bit. So what is enough and what are you trying to do with it?

Speaker 2: 6:55

Well, you know, if I were to oversimplify it, it starts with a playwriting competition. We put out a call across the country for Teen writers in previous years that's been like six to twelve grade, this year It's 13 to 19 to write short, ten minute plays about the issue of gun violence. And then, through a process of reading and selection, we bring together a Small group of those plays around six of those plays and then we make those plays available to theaters, high schools, community organizations, anyone who wants to produce them. We make them available across the country so that we single out a day In the year that we have a nationwide reading and we get organizations to join us on that day to read these plays. And So you know, if act one is getting the plays written, an act two is getting the plays up on their feet and producing communities.

Speaker 2: 7:49

Act three of the project is really then okay, now you've heard these plays, what are you gonna do about it? like what, what, what is it moving you to do in a way that maybe you hadn't hadn't had the The nudge in the past? and so each one of these readings in these Communities is unique, because this issue doesn't impact every community the same way. So we really encourage, whether it's a theater or a high school, to utilize this event as an opportunity to have those critical Conversations and also inspire action in the community. That comes down to who do you invite like, do you if your school, inviting your principal and your superintendent, your school board members, or Branch out inviting people from the city, city council and mayors We've had us representatives show up at our readings and people who sit on committees about crime prevention and Out of these you know what the plays do.

Speaker 2: 8:52

It gives a common meeting ground to Talk about and think about these issues through the perspective of young people, which many of the folks in the audience who are adults Are so far removed from their experience that it becomes this huge moment of realization of how different their experience is growing up and how much they think about this issue in comparison to when they were teenagers. And these opportunities to do these readings have Flourished in a lot of amazing ways if they've created some long-standing partnerships between theaters and local violence and gun violence prevention organizations and greater relationships between the teens in their community and the theater company. So that's the overarching sort of through line of the project. And then the plays get published and they get. They're available in perpetuity for theater companies and high schools to produce as part of their seasons and Something that they can continue to be used as a tool beyond our nationwide reading date and having read through The plays and I have a few favorites I don't know if we can call them out.

Speaker 1: 10:07

Here on it, i think but I think rehearsals my favorite by far out of all of them, which we're going to be linking to where folks can find the plays to go through and read them, but that one particular deals was kind of this obsession with lockdown drills.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Yeah and I think goes to show the way that adults are forcing this neuroses of gun violence through our lack of action And then like how we are choosing to respond to gun violence. And I think it fits with a lot of things we've talked on here. But I want to really stress too that I think it's it's so vital that the types of gun violence and that the content of These short plays are not just on mass shootings, right, and are not just on a particular response or a moment of gun violence. It's. It's not very like, i think I think of the plays that would have been produced kind of when I when I think when we all were in school, right, would have been very like lifetime movie special, sure, on this right.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Like where, whereas these are, i think, for the most part very raw depictions of all different types of gun violence, all different types of communities, different types of people and What gun violence does more broadly to kind of the world, and I'm wondering if that was intentional well, i mean, yes, but also, in the beginning, you know, i was a little ignorant, right, so I'm, i'm creating this project in response to these mass school shootings, right, and I, i was schooled pretty early on by reaching out to, you know, folks in gun violence prevention Organizations and other people who have, you know, dealt with this issue, that you need to think a little bit, brought more broadly, about this and Think about all of the ways that this issue impacts communities. So What has been Releviatory to me about this project and I, you know, i've read 300 something of these plays at this point, right, is, yes, there are, there are plenty of plays that are about school shootings and mass shootings, and there's also, you know, you've got new people who are writing plays, the teens who have never written plays before. So there's, you know, there's a good number of plays that focus on the act of violence. You know, and and that's something, if we lay out one ground rule, sort of, when we put out this call for submissions Is, like you know, it's probably least interesting to focus on depicting violence. You know, what is gun violence about? what is the story about gun violence about? it's about people. It's about the moments that lead up to or the moments afterwards. It's the response, it's who's impacted. So we try to really lay that out there, to try to stray people away from feeling like a clay about gun violence is depicting violence.

Speaker 2: 12:44

But then, man, that first year we had seven plays and and what made me really open my eyes is The. What they are writing about. They're writing about gun violence, but they're writing about gun violence like it's Like if you hurt yourself, you have inflammation around the wound, right. They're writing about gun violence like it's inflammation, right, but what's the root cause, like what's the root injury? So you have plays that are about racial inequity. You have pray. There's one play that's a four-act circus. That's about how gun violence is tied to the American mythology and colonialism and just the, the way we took the land from the people who are originally inhabited here, how those things are linked. And Here I am reading these plays and I'm like, well, this is not what I expected at all.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Yeah but I'm learning so much, and I'm learning just how Perseus this issue is and how it is linked to so many other issues That we ought to be talking about. So these plays and these, these playwrights are so smart in that when they write these plays, they're writing about how did we get to this moment, like, how did we get to this moment of gun violence? Like, why did it happen? It's not Just because someone pulled the trigger on a gun, it's all of these other things that precipitated it. So that's been really exciting.

Speaker 2: 14:15

And then, intentionally, though, as we Select our collection each year, we are trying to look at the collection and be like okay, we're covering this angle, we're looking at this story. We we don't want to have a wash of the same aspect of the issue being played out again and again and again. We also try to do that in terms of like, how do people approach it? Like if this is more of a like a coral or group piece, and that this is like a scene or a monologue or Or tone too. But it's hard, because you know it's it's a, it's a hard topic to write, say, a comedy about, right. So yeah so there.

Speaker 2: 14:58

But interesting themes emerge too. So the first year, when people are writing, like in the height of the pandemic and lockdown, so many of those seven plays were about anxiety, you know the, the fear that it's going to happen eventually. And then last year's plays the 2022 plays were very much. It was. It was almost like grief was the theme like. It was like a resignation to the inevitability that this is going to happen. And, and you know, i don't know if it's going back to school and paying back in The reminders of that, that environment that it could happen at any time, is what shifted. But it's interesting that when we're pairing them together, we start to see, you know, we started to take the temperature of maybe like where this class of writers is. That.

Speaker 3: 15:50

I'm wondering. You mentioned some of the submissions come from people who have never written a play before, and Also you're focusing on youth, and so I'm wondering if you could walk us through the process from an initial submission to a play actually Opening up.

Speaker 2: 16:03

Yeah. Well, what's what I think is cool about the project? and I'm biased, of course, but what I think is cool is that you know there's no fee to entry. So anybody who wants to write play or wants to be a part of it, you know Your school doesn't even have to sign up. You just if you find out about the opportunity, you can go through the whole process yourself and submit the play. So there's really like, look, very low barriers to do that and once the plays are submitted, depending on how many we get we You know I again calling in favors from all my theater friends We get together, you know, between 75 to 100 different readers to read through the plays.

Speaker 2: 16:41

Each play gets read at least three times by by three different individuals and Every playwright will at least get feedback by three individuals. It's really important to me that, because it is important that what they're writing down and that the people are putting themselves out there, that they know that they're being heard and they know that someone read their play. There's so many of these kind of competitions where you just kind of like send off the email and it goes off into the void And you have no idea, like if anyone you've ever read it. So that's a big component for us. There's two rounds. If you make it through the second round You'll get up to six people reading your play. At that point We try to pare down the submissions to about like 20 or so and that those 20 are read by our our selection committee. And the past Three rounds of this, including this current round, that selection committee has included Academy award-winning screenwriters, tony award-winning and Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights, some of the most produced playwrights in America now. And what I love about that is that you have sort of the premier voices of today Looking at the voices of the future, right, and they, they go through, they read all 20 of them, they give all 20 of them feedback. So you're getting this feedback from these amazing artists and then we get together over zoom and we sort of Hash it out like who, what will be our lineup and why, and then, once those plays are picked, playwrights Will be a part of a workshop in process to Incorporate any feedback that they agree with. You know the plays still there, so they have final say, but they get to incorporate any feedback that they want and revise their play. And then you know on on the back end.

Speaker 2: 18:32

I'm trying to get every theater and high school signed up to do this process of putting on the plays for the nationwide reading. And Last year what was really great is that we had our flagship reading at Lincoln Center in New York City. It was performed by roundabout youth ensemble and all eight of our playwrights were able to come out and watch That reading in New York City. Yeah, it was awesome because, especially that first year, everything was digital and we had a really great like digital collaboration with some really big theaters across the country. But for me, i, i, we were.

Speaker 2: 19:10

The first thing we did that day is we had a Little tour of our publisher in New York who, who puts out the plays when they're all done, invited us, invited us all over to their offices And I came into the room and I saw all the playwrights sitting there And I broke down like I cried because it was suddenly tangible. You know like these were Here. They were. This is the first time I had met any of the playwrights, really any of the people working on this project, and it really just, you know, drove home the, the tangible human aspect of this. So I mean that experience of Going through that process of your plays selected. You know people are reading it, you know you're getting feedback, you're working on it the whole professional playwright experience and then seeing it come to life On stage and then being able to pick it up and hold it in your hand. You know that's one of the goal. Goals of this project from the get-go was that they feel like Professionals through the whole process, that they're treated like professionals through the whole process.

Speaker 3: 20:19

That's incredible and I was wondering if you could just sort of break it down the what the flagship performance is.

Speaker 2: 20:25

Oh sure, absolutely. So we have this large, you know Collaboration, this grassroots collaboration of people doing the plays on the same evening, but it would It was pointed out to me pretty early on is like that's massive and also hard to pin down, like hard to picture and hard to sort of get your arms around without say like a centralized sort of like hub production that feels like the cornerstone of the larger national effort. The point of it is it's kind of like one place where we can, you know, then bring a lot of attention to the project and then shine that attention back out to what people are doing nationally.

Speaker 1: 21:10

I just I really want to applaud the work that you were doing, that enough places doing more broadly, because that's better than some professional experiences are by far right.

Speaker 3: 21:20

Many.

Speaker 1: 21:20

Yes, in terms of not just the the fact that you know people are reading it, and then the mentorship, but like then, the production value of knowing that your work is being actually performed, which is always the goal of theater writing right, like you don't expect it to just live on a page, so to know that folks across the country are hearing it and seeing it, and then that this has a particular point to it right That added.

Speaker 1: 21:44

then activism part, I think, despite a lot of you know kind of this thorough line of despair or frustration that's in a lot of these plays, I think has to then have a benefit in terms of, like hopefulness for change, right, That you're actually seeing the adults in the room trying to understand and trying to amplify the voice and then young people being able to hear it and see it and participate in it, Because so many of the characters are you can like they're young people themselves, right?

Speaker 2: 22:13

Yeah, yeah, i. I think one thing that I'm acutely aware of this time around in year three, and something we're working with team enough on as our national action partner for this round, is that when people hear the plays, and they're and we've concluded their evening and they've heard all the plays and they're sort of now marinating in what all of this is they're kind of ready, like they want to know, like, what do I do next? What do you want me to do? I'm pissed, i feel enlightened, i feel energized. Give me something to do. And I think you know not that we've failed on this point the last two years, but this year we're really, really interested in how do we, how do we catch those people right, like they're ready to take this big leap on this issue? And, like me, i think you know there's a lot of people who, this, this is an issue that they do truly care about, but haven't been moved to action yet. You know, just just have been right up to the line about, like, i care about this, i know it's important, i want to do something. What do I do? And I think this is sort of this event breaks down those barriers, right, that's something about theater too, like. I think that's why, you know, early on, people are like well, you know, like, why is it just theater? Why not do, like film or music or, like you know, visual arts? And I'm like, the thing about theater is that you it's about community and it's about the actors need us, the audience, in order for this exchange to happen. And we, you know, for lack of a better word we become complicit in the act of these stories playing out. And so we get invested. And you know, the engine of theater is empathy.

Speaker 2: 24:04

And as much as the statistics around this issue, they're fucking insane. They drive you to complete insanity. They just don't seem to do the job, for whatever reason. Like I, little sidebar, i remember being a freshman in high school and actually doing a civics debate about you know why there should be stricter laws around gun violence prevention, and I just stood up there and I just, i, just, i just said statistics. I wasn't really debating, i was just like being like I don't know how there is a debate here, and I remember I think I lost that debate because I can't remember the reason, but it was something around like, because I was just saying statistics and like, but that should be reason enough, right, like it's math, but because it isn't enough, these plays end up being a way to pierce through the sort of inaction, the apathy, the sort of I guess that's just how it is mentality that seems to be something pervading our society at the moment, and specifically for I think I mean, i think the teens who are involved get it. I mean, they're, they're, i think they're right there with it I think it's the adults in the room who end up being like wow, i had no idea, really, you know.

Speaker 2: 25:28

So theater ends up being this perfect vehicle to talk about the issue, to look at it from a different angle and, to you know, get these sort of like quick but deep dives into these different stories and make you feel something about the issue, and not beyond, just maybe like annoyed or incensed or enraged, but you feel. One of the things that Manny Oliver changed the ref says is that you know people say to him like I can't imagine, you know what it is like losing your son. You know I can't imagine this. And like I think these plays put people in the place of imagining, like you're with us for 90 minutes, your job is to imagine And now that you've seen it through that lens. What do you want to do about it?

Speaker 2: 26:17

Anecdotally, about this project, all I ever hear is that people walk away from it feeling changed somehow, that the plays have got them to think differently, that writing the plays, even if they're involved in this movement, got them to think about their activism in a different way and maybe even clarify what it is that they're really all about. That these young playwrights feel changed just through the act of getting their voice down and figuring out what their voice is. You know, not everybody who wants to be a part of saying something or enacting change about this issue is gonna be the kind of person who's gonna be able to feel comfortable standing up at a rally and speaking or, you know, marching or you know, or starting a giant organization right. But they have something important to say And my hope is that, through enough, we can provide some sort of outlet for that and those people.

Speaker 3: 27:15

And I'm wondering what other impacts have come from the enough plays for the audience, for the creators, for mentors, for everyone sort of involved in this process in some way.

Speaker 2: 27:26

Yeah, i mean to highlight a few examples. So last year we had one of our playwrights, taylor Lafayette. Her brother was shot and killed. It was a mugging. There's like no information about who the person was. It's completely you know. It's a complete mystery And you know she was grieving And she learned about this project soon after that happened and used the process as a way to well to get her voice out there. But then and to get her emotions that had been sort of boiling under the surface like out onto the page, but then also seeing it in performance, seeing how it has an impact on other people and that the purpose of her writing can be to move other individuals and to that, her turning her pain into a purpose. That's a phrase.

Speaker 2: 28:30

Another group out of South Bend, indiana, connect to be the change. They. That was founded by two mothers who both lost kids to gun violence. One of the mothers, luria, lost two kids to gun violence. They partnered with South Bend Civic Theater first year And the second year Luria came back.

Speaker 2: 28:48

She is now employed by the theater and also she was like directing the reading and she was casting survivors in her network that lined up with the plays to, you know, bring their story to, the stories that these young people had written, and so there's things like that. That like when you, you know, when I look back and I think about how this whole project was, in a way, just a knee-jerk reaction to maybe like my own embarrassment that I wasn't doing anything about this issue and that I couldn't have conceived of some of these outcomes, it's, i guess it's just it's been very satisfying for me as an artist and I would say like to it to answer this question in one other way, like it's made me really think about what it is should theater be doing in communities and in a reaction to things like this in society. It's made me really reconsider sort of where my center is as a theater artist as well and how am I using this vocation to really make a difference.

Speaker 1: 29:56

And I wonder where you see enough plays going in the future, beyond, obviously, when people are winning Tonys, you know calling out as their first, as their first production, you getting a name drop, what? where do you see this inevitably going in the next coming years?

Speaker 2: 30:13

Yeah, i think we're entering this third year and I think we are following a similar timeline that we did the last two years. But I do think that there's probably a shift in the future on, like, how to apply this work. So like, for instance, by the time we're done with this round, we'll have three. You know volumes of anthologies that exist as tools that can be used in this space. So how are we leveraging the existing tools we have? And that's so? that's.

Speaker 2: 30:41

One question that I have is like how can we use those as an effective way to start conversations all across the country? And then the second thing that I think about a lot is, intentionally, this program has a really broad reach and has casting a really wide net to try to get young people and theater companies, et cetera, from all over the country to participate in a big national conversation. But what if I were to say, go to our collaborators at the Goodman Theater in Chicago or go to our collaborators at South Bend Civic Theater and do a more focused, deep dive with the community? that's not necessarily around you know a competition selection process but just in making sure those stories are heard. Those are some things I think about in the future.

Speaker 2: 31:37

And then also I think about how this is. You know there are other. Gun violence is one of many issues that we need to figure out, some movement forward on How this model of engaging theater with issues that young people care about, how that model can then be applied to other topics as well. So those are some of the ways that I think moving forward and you know, eventually, like I'd love to be able to convince all the theaters that we work with that this is something that they can model their programming on too, and work with the young people and their communities, even if it's not about gun violence, but just because that connection between the theater companies and the youth needs to be strengthened all around.

Speaker 1: 32:28

It's like youth civic art engagement Yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:31

Yeah, i mean that's been. the exciting thing about this project is that it does become an intersection for many things, and often there are theater artists who find themselves really passionate about one or two of those or all three of those things, right, and so it's been interesting to see, when people roll out this program in their community, what they focus on and how, because it really can be something that can be tailor-made to what it is that their priorities are as a theater company.

Speaker 3: 33:09

And if people are listening and hopefully they're like I want to read these plays or I know a student I got to tell about this.

Speaker 1: 33:16

I need all of the anthologies tomorrow I want to see a production of this in my hometown.

Speaker 3: 33:21

Yeah, where should they go to learn more about it?

Speaker 2: 33:24

Absolutely Well. Best place to go is our website, so enoughplayscom. Obviously, we're on the social medias and you can find us on Instagram and Facebook at enoughplaysproject, and Twitter at enoughplays.

Speaker 1: 33:38

And, of course, all those links will be in the description of this episode. But please go check them out everyone, because really plays and gun violence. It's the best Hey want to share with the podcast. Listeners can now get in touch with us here at RedBlueandBrady via phone or text message. Simply call or text us at 480-744-3452, with your thoughts, questions, concerns ideas, cat pictures, whatever.

Speaker 3: 34:05

Thanks for listening. As always, brady's lifesaving work in Congress, the courts and communities across the country is made possible thanks to you. For more information on Brady or how to get involved in the fight against gun violence, please like and subscribe to the podcast. Get in touch with us at BradyUnitedorg or on social at BradyBuzz. Be brave and remember. Take action, not size. Don't buy guns, don't drug, don't die with guns.