Playwrights take on Wikileaks story

Posted at 4:32 PM on December 17, 2010 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Theater, Writing

Julian Assange, a man surrounded by drama

Max "Bunny" Sparber, who's temporarily filling in as editor of Minnesota Playlist decided to conduct a little experiment. Noting the inherent drama in the current "wikileaks" scandal, and the jailing of its director Julian Assange.

Since many plays are inspired by events of the day, Sparber asked several local playwrights how they would take the wikileaks story and turn into a stage production. Here are a couple of examples:

From playwright Jeffrey Hatcher:

The premise is that Julian Assange moves from safe house to safe house, never sleeping at the same place twice. The stage is bifurcated -- two sitting rooms side-by-side. On the left, a wealthy couple are terribly excited that their Hampstead house has been chosen for tonight. On the right, a suburban couple of the "Keeping Up Appearances" type wait for a Repairman to come fix their television. A computer crossed-wire sends the Repairman to the Hampstead couple and Julian to the suburban couple. Code words, expectations, and the like lead to mistaken identities, sexual high-jinks, and the eventual arrival of both MI-5 and an inspector out of Joe Orton.

From playwright Carson Kreitzer:

For me, it's the boy-who-cried wolf aspect that may be the most interesting ... the next WikiLeaks dump was supposed to be on the banks!!!! What if that one is actually more damning (which I'm pretty sure it will be), the actions revealed even more destructive to the lives of those not in power? What if more poor people are displaced, subject to violence, or even killed (by starvation or disease rather than bullets) by the movement of capital than by the current wars? How many of the current wars, in various parts of the globe, are caused by the aggressive movement of capital? (Violence surrounding diamonds, coltan, oil, etc. etc.)

What if no one is listening anymore?

You can read all the playwrights' responses here.

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