Just Beneath the Brightness: Thoughts on Cold War Choir Practice by Mara Nelson-Greenberg

When my sister was in first grade and I was in kindergarten, her teacher taught her class a song that they would sing together each day before leaving school. It was called Celtic Pride: “Celtic Pride! Feeling the green down deep inside. Celtic Pride! We’re gonna get them back one more time…” I wasn’t in my sister’s class, but the ritual of singing this song with my sister and all of her friends was so irresistible to me that I learned all the lyrics and I’d join in during pickup. I wanted to belong with the belongers—because look at how much fun the belongers were having!

My time as a Celtic’s fan was cut blessedly short when I moved to Brooklyn at the end of the school year (go Knicks), but I was revisiting that memory as I watched Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice. The play tells the story of a Black family in Syracuse living through the Reagan era—and at the top of the play, the daughter of the family, Meek, has joined a nationalist, all white children’s choir.

MEEK
Choir Leader says / a long
range intercontinental ballistic missile…

CHOIR LEADER
A long range intercontinental ballistic missile takes only
thirty minutes to reach the United States from the Soviet Union.

MEEK
That’s why our concerts are exactly twenty-eight minutes long. /Just in case…

CHOIR LEADER
Just in case a missile launches when we start.

MEEK
We’d still have two minutes to hug our families before we die.

But Meek slowly realizes the real danger isn’t a nuclear threat from abroad—it’s the more insidious and ubiquitous violence in the country she actually lives in. After all, the power of indoctrination is not just in the positives, the set of beliefs actively impressed upon a group. It’s in the negatives, too: the parts of reality that are not just left unacknowledged, but are pushed aside and sublimated with cheery messaging and distraction. Meek’s choir leader explains to the group of children, with all the seriousness of a teacher leading a friendly story time, that “the Soviets have “over 40,000 nuclear warheads in their stockpile: ballistic missiles, MIG 21s, MIG 23s…” Meek’s father Smooch quickly offers a rebuttal: “I don’t know why you worried ‘bout them Russians. The FBI just bombed a bunch of Black folks in Philly.”

But it takes a long time for the implications of all of this danger to catch up with the audience. This is the magic of the play. It’s zippy, vibrant, cheerful, and really, really fun. I had a kind of goofy smile plastered across my face for the entire show, even as I braced for impact. And so as Ro exposes the inner workings of indoctrination, she uses its mechanisms on the audience, allowing the play itself to lull you into a kind of submission. And she manages to do this even as you’re fully aware that there’s a palpable danger constantly thrumming just beneath the brightness. We know we shouldn’t, but we lose sight of what all this danger actually means.

Which is how I found myself blindsided by the very painful interpersonal fallout of all of these encircling threats. When Smooch’s brother Clay, a Black Republican with a high-ranking position in Reagan’s cabinet, returns home with his ailing wife, he spars repeatedly with Smooch over his unwavering commitment to a President and a country that has never protected their family. Amidst their fighting over conflicting ideologies, Clay tells Smooch he gave his brother the roadmap to success, and Smooch exclaims: “I don’t need a fuckin’ roadmap! I need my brother! Where the fuck you been, man? Huh? Where the fuck you been?” I couldn’t shake that moment for the entire rest of the play. Aligning yourself with the dominant group does not only distract you from and make you complicit in perpetuating real harm. It separates and isolates you from the people you love. It’s just as Choir Leader told us: Twenty-eight minutes for your country, two minutes for your family. Until they’re one and the same.

The play ends with Meek, her father and her grandmother sitting around a Christmas tree. The Choir sings about Gorbachev and the Speak + Spell the Soviets used to communicate with Meek is still playing its three toned melody. But for this moment, the family is together, telling a story at Christmas.