Ro Reddick invites us to Cold War Choir Practice in her award-winning play with songs

When Ro Reddick was a child, she joined a peace choir, entirely by accident…

Her best friend sang in it, and one day her mother came, picked her up, and took her there. “It wasn’t even a conversation, it was just like, okay, now I’m in this ‘save the world from itself’ choir.” They used to meet at the zoo and sing songs. Unbeknownst to Reddick, there was a national chapter that had written a musical and taken members to Moscow. “I remember a few of the older kids in the choir had gone to Russia and when they came back, they were telling us stories about how different it was from the United States, obviously. The songs that we sang just stuck with me.”

Her award-winning zany play with songs, Cold War Choir Practice, which recently jointly won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, reflects on that time, except: “The choir in this play is nationalist and is a little sinister – my choir didn’t have that vibe!”

Meek is a kid living in upstate New York in 1987. She represents a piece of her younger self. Our heroine of sorts “is thrown into a sort of maze of Cold War espionage and cult mystery”, explains Reddick: “Her dad runs a local roller rink, and she lives above it with him and her grandmother. Then her uncle comes to visit with his wife, who is sick, and nobody knows really what’s going on with her – she’s just acting a little funny.”

She continues: “Her uncle is a prominent Black conservative in Reagan’s White House, so the politics of the family is very different and the rupture between the brothers is exposed again.” The play itself is so “bonkers” that Reddick laughs that there was really no need to lean any more into the kookiness of the ’80s in the production, other than the clothes they wear and the technology that they use, for its current staging Off-Broadway.

“It’s really interesting because adult me was working through a lot of anxiety about what is happening in the world, and then I remembered this very specific time in my childhood,” she starts, “So to write a character who is so vulnerable and so optimistic about what could happen, and her ability to sort of impact the world is a strange feeling. I feel like I’m working through things through that character.”

Reddick continues to explain how the idea of surveillance and being watched, and the real threat of nuclear war, are all childhood anxieties that continue to exist today: “I don’t want to say that I feel total powerlessness, but more that I can feel my own smallness in the world when facing these large forces that have a lot of control over what is going to happen to me.”

Music has continued to be an enjoyable practice for the playwright, who used to work as an actor, to process things. She remembers children pleading not to let nuclear war happen through song, and added a homage to that in Cold War Choir Practice: “There’s a song called ‘Lay Down Your Arms’, and the choir is singing to the president, President Reagan and Gorbachev… That song is a tribute to my childhood choir, and the rest are satire.”

“It was beautiful to just return to that place and to create my own version of the songs that have stuck in my head over these many decades.”

Reddick’s website states that she “writes off-kilter comedies; the theme songs to your late capitalist nightmares.” She’s overjoyed with news of the SBB Prize win (and that Audra McDonald has read her play). For her sense of humour, she credits her family: “They have been through some really intense experiences, but they’re some of the funniest people that I know… The world we live in is strange. I look around, and it’s like, how do we process the absurdity that is everyday life?” For her, it’s by writing plays that match the strangeness of the world.

In Cold War Choir Practice, the characters are finding their way into groups or bumping up against groups: “They’re trying to find some balance between their own autonomy and group membership and what that group membership can offer.” The way that the characters interact from the very start promises a rupture of some sort, and there ends up being a few. Reddick says: “There’s this emotional explosion between the brothers, and then a literal explosion, followed by a poetic moment where Meek remembers the explosion.”

She teases her current project – it’s set in a very analog, yet modern world, where everyone is queer, and “there’s a powerful notebook magnate who makes luxury notebooks that you write your goals and your hopes and dreams, and there’s a young woman who has a special psychic ability that is particularly useful in this field,” she explains, “Chaos ensues.”

More of that creative choral chaos from the great mind of Ro Reddick and her roller rinks are all we could ever hope for in this strange world.