There Once was a Child by Bailey Williams

The morning I started this essay I woke up early and looked at my phone. I really try not to look at my phone, particularly not first thing in the morning, for reasons that I don’t have to explain but usually fit somewhere in a convoluted Venn diagram called horror injustice fury. This morning the phone was a doozy. We’re at war with Iran, I calmly informed my partner as she blinked herself awake. Whyyyy? she groaned into the pillow.

Why, indeed. I’ve read a thousand articles by now and I’m no closer to understanding. Living in a globalized world is like being a kid again. It’s incomprehensible, overwhelming, and scary. There’s nothing you can really do about it except try to believe that you’re safe. War is something that happens to other people. Right?

It might not be clear based on this totally grim introduction, but Cold War Choir Practice is a fantastic romp, a cocktail of mood and movement and music decked in Soviet Santa Clause red. It’s a nostalgia stew of Christmas-time, the 1980s, childhood, spy thrillers, with an eerie relevance pulsing in the background. Is it the threat of nuclear war? A celebrity president with a fondness for inane, meme-able language? Or, perhaps more succinctly, how intimately personal and immediate geopolitical chaos can feel? Take your pick!

The play follows a precocious young girl named Meek, who lives with her father Smooch and her grandmother Puddin above an indoor roller rink in upstate New York. She’s worried about nuclear war, building a fall-out shelter after school the way other kids might build forts. Her choir leader tells her “the voice of a child can stop nuclear attack;” her dad wonders why she’s worried about Russians when “the FBI just bombed a bunch of Black folks in Philly.” Skating around and between this little family, we have our titular choir, who sing and play kids and Soviets and mysterious strangers (as well as, satisfyingly, toilet paper holders and doors).

We soon meet Meek’s uncle, Clay, a Black Republican working with the Reagan administration, much to the horror and shame of his family. He’s come upstate from DC to stash his “spooky-looking” wife, Virgie, away from the influence of Wellspring, a cult that promises “optimization.” Her arrival, plus the delivery of a Russian language Speak + Spell courtesy of Meek’s Soviet Pen Pal, trigger a Rube Goldberg-esque series of events leading to the untimely destruction (and Atomic Fireball fall-out) of Mr. Davis’ Candy Emporium… and also world peace. (For now.)

What we’re watching, ultimately, is a uniquely American coming-of-age story. When we first meet Meek, she tells us exactly what she wants. “A Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” But it’s the last one that’s most important, because it represents safety and security, the two things every child deserves to have. By the end, however, Meek wants something different. She wants money, money to help fix the damage to her family’s roller rink. She’s learned the terrible lesson of America, that there’s only one currency here. It’s not peace or love or the power of children’s voices asking for safety and security. It’s the thing her father was trying to teach her from the beginning: the government’s not going to take care of you. They’ve got to look out for themselves.

At the end, Meek tells the story of Christmas. “There once was a child. A small child…” Of course, this is also her story, the story of a child who brought peace to the world (through light treason, pure nerve, and spy antics). It’s a nice idea, that one child can make the world anew. It’d be much nicer if they didn’t have to.