IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS, I've read a stellar novel, an amazingly detailed investigative piece, and now a shattering memoir about what happens when the machinery of fighting terrorism grinds innocents into victims. This subject is at the heart of Theatre Conspiracy's new play, Foreign Radical.
Read MoreIn her research for Foreign Radical, Kathleen read the book This Machine Kills Secrets and came across a party game that cryptographers played while inventing encryption techniques that would soon become industry standard (onion routing, torrents). These radicals were inventing the building blocks of secure communication, file sharing, e-commerce and, of course, whistle-blowing.
In the game, players wrote a secret on a piece of paper, put it in a sealed envelope and then routed the envelopes between individuals who either sought to maintain or expose the secret.
For Foreign Radical, we are adapting the game because it has great potential for theatrical application and audience interactivity:
Read MoreWe’re all in the same boat, and as Leonard Cohen says, “everybody knows”.
If you’ve tuned into the news about cyberspace over the last couple of years, you realize we’re all being tracked, tagged, and titillated/distracted just enough to maintain the status quo. You’re still free to dismiss this as conspiracy but everyone knows that under the scrutiny of the puppeteers gerrymandering the Harpers, Obamas, Camerons and Merkels of the world, people displaying political agency outside the true party line are summarily placed in the ‘radical’ category and subjected to extraordinary surveillance and harassment.
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