Progressives know that history will be
remembered, and thus the future will be shaped, not through textbooks but
through dramatic treatments of historical events: movies, television, plays.
That’s why left-leaning actors are quitting a new play, about the controversial
shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri:
because it doesn’t promote a narrative about the incident that suits the
progressive agenda.
Ferguson is written and directed by the openly
conservative Phelim McAleer, a man who is not intimidated by controversy or leftist
fury. He is the filmmaker behind Not Evil
Just Wrong (about the global warming hysteria), FrackNation (in which he takes on environmentalists and
anti-fracking activists) and the upcoming Gosnell
(about the mass-murdering abortionist, a film being scripted and directed,
respectively, by writer Andrew Klavan and Justified
actor Nick Searcy – also prominent conservatives).
The play is opening in Los Angeles, but
McAleer also hopes to put the show on YouTube and bring the production to
Ferguson itself. His goal with the play, as with all his work, is to rescue the
truth from propaganda and shine a light on both.
The actors’ discomfort with the script is
very revealing because, as McAleer puts it in an email he circulated in
response to a Los Angeles Times article about the actors, “The script is comprised entirely of Grand Jury
testimony. No added lines. Just the truth. But the play is Verbatim Theatre,
word-for-word testimony heard by the Grand Jury. The only agenda is the truth.”
Nowhere in the L.A. Times piece is
this made clear about the script.
At the end of the play, the audience is invited
to vote on whether Wilson should have been indicted. “This time the audience
gets to be the Grand Jury,” McAleer wrote on the play’s Indiegogo crowdfunding page. “The performances in Los Angeles will be
dramatized staged readings with interactive voting. Every night the audience
will decide who’s telling the truth, decide who’s lying, and decide if they
would indict Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown.”
One actor, Philip Casnoff, showed up for the
first rehearsal of Ferguson without
having even read the full script. He assumed that the testimony would consist
of a variety of viewpoints that would, at the very least, reflect a “fog of
war,” if not actually condemn Officer Wilson. But then he realized that the
testimony didn’t bolster the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” narrative that the left used
to gin up angry protests nationwide; instead, it supports Wilson’s side of the
story.
The play ends with the prosecutor asking a
witness, “Do you feel like this could have ended up any other way?” The witness
replies, “Yeah, it could have, if Michael Brown had just stopped running,”
meaning running toward Wilson. “It
could have ended another way. The officer had no other choice.”
The Times
reported that after those lines were read in rehearsal, “an awkward quiet fell
over the cast members.” Several members, the Times claimed, requested changes to the script that would add more
balance to the final witness’ perspective, that would be more sympathetic to
Brown. McAleer rejected those requests.
“It felt like the purpose of the piece was to
show, ‘Of course he was not indicted — here’s why,’” actor Casnoff said. And
when he learned that the playwright was an unapologetic conservative, Casnoff,
who describes himself as “very liberal, left-wing-leaning,” thought, “Whoa,
this is not the place for me to be.” He and four others of the 13-member cast
quit the play.
“He claims that he wrote this to try to get
to the truth of it, but everybody’s truth is totally subjective,” said a black
actress who resigned. “When you come to the matter of what really happened,
nobody really knows for sure, because everybody has a different take on it… It
just didn’t feel right to me.”
It didn’t feel right to her because she wants
to believe the shooting of Brown was racial injustice. But she’s wrong. Yes,
people interpret events subjectively; that’s why the law requires evidence, and
that’s why the claims of witnesses who told investigators that Brown had his
hands up, was shot in the back while running, was shot while lying on the
ground, etc. were recanted or debunked – because the physical evidence proved
them false. “The truth is the truth,” says McAleer. “If it doesn’t fit in with
their beliefs, they need to change their beliefs.”
Another actress, Donzaleigh Abernathy, the daughter
of civil rights movement leader Ralph David Abernathy, asked a question in
rehearsal that was often heard during the Ferguson investigation: “Why not
shoot him in the leg?” It’s a question that never fails to elicit eye-rolling
and head-shaking from law enforcement and anyone else who understands that violent
confrontations don’t go down like they do on television.
The Times
described Abernathy as one of the script’s most heated critics. Prior to a cast
meeting with McAleer scheduled for last Thursday night, she said, “I want to
hear what he has to say face to face. I actually want to know, on a moral
level, how can you do something like this that you know will divide America? Does
it make you feel good? Obviously he has a personal agenda. What is his personal
agenda?”
Of course, what divided America over Ferguson
was lies, not the truth. What divided America was the race-obsessed left’s
opportunistic agenda, not McAleer’s. “These are people who claim to love
diversity,” McAleer said, “and they don’t love diversity — they just want
people to agree with them.” Or else.
McAleer is undaunted by the desertions. “I’m
determined to fight this attempt at censorship by the theatre/Hollywood
establishment,” he wrote on the Indiegogo page. “The show will go on. The truth
about Ferguson will be told.” If the rest of what the Times describes as “the decidedly more liberal cast” quits — and some are threatening to — McAleer said he will find a new cast. “There’s
got to be some actors in L.A. who aren’t scared of controversy,” he told the Times.
There are, but there aren’t that many who
aren’t scared of the truth.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/26/15)
