COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother would swing by in her station wagon and take Jackie and I to choir practice every week. We were in the local chapter of “Peace Child”, a Cold War era children’s chorus, and clearly whoever organized this chapter had a connection at the zoo, because that’s where we rehearsed, often in a conference room, sometimes in the lobby. We sang about world peace and nuclear annihilation in equal measure. We learned songs in “all the languages of the world”. We sang a Song for a Russian Child. We sang to save the world from itself. When rehearsal ended, we climbed back into the car and I returned to a life where my family’s concerns were more immediate and the stakes felt just as high.

I was in my second semester of grad school when Putin invaded Ukraine. Think pieces asked if the US had entered a new Cold War. In an art history class we discussed the first Cold War and considered how citizens, then and now, carve out pockets of autonomy when the prerogatives of the nation threaten to overwhelm them. All of this brought my choir memories flooding back. When I shared this story with a playwright friend, she responded, that’s a play.

It’s rare you’re reminded of a more innocent version of yourself, one that was just starting to understand how much danger the world can hold (and perhaps that’s why I sometimes got choked up watching performances). Was I ever really so young? So hopeful? In some ways Cold War Choir Practice is a coming of age story. It’s a play interested in the moment when our palms, feeling their way through the dark, hit one of the jagged contours of the world, its sharp edges drawing blood. It’s also about how we negotiate our relationship to the groups that sometimes help us, sometimes harm us, but always hold some kind of power over us. More than anything, it’s about what we can find just past the sharp edges, if we reach far enough. Another set of hands feeling their way through the dark, ready to clasp our own.

– Ro Reddick