Sitting with Strangers: The Case for Political Plays

“Theatre, on its own, is a very unique art form because it’s about people all showing up and being in a room together. That creates a sense of collective energy, and that energy is important. The act of going outside and sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers and sharing in that atmosphere for just an hour and a half is something that doesn’t happen very often. It is a very unique space to create political messaging.” – Director of I’m Still Here, Sofia Costa Franco (YC ‘28).

Consider any public square with a chair today: we would much rather disengage, heads plunged downward into our screens, than remain present with those we do not know (and tragically, even with people we do know). Sharing space with strangers comfortably and regularly is largely unappreciated in modern society. Though such undistracted instances are so rare, perhaps their occurrences should be celebrated. 

Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, discusses this warped reality from individualism at length: “More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus… When it comes to our understanding of experience, however, we could use a great deal more moral panic—if moral is understood as reminding us of our obligations to one another,” (The Extinction of Experience, 2). It is precisely for this obligation to one another that political plays like I’m Still Here exist.

Rather than bystanders or distant remote viewers, in live political theatre, the audience takes on a more present role in the experience. I’m Still Here, a play adapted by Costa Franco from a popular Brazilian film by the same name, follows one family’s story during the military dictatorship in Brazil during the 1970s. As the director, Costa Franco brings together a group of actors from diverse backgrounds to engage with themes of loss and political dissent through the theatre of the oppressed. 

Costa Franco believes a fundamental component in this otherwise distant narrative is live interaction. The audience no longer consists of spectators but rather “spec-actors”: alive, present, and in the moment with the actors, who are attentive to their cues. The ticket holders are quietly yet assuredly involved in the emotional revolution unfolding onstage.

That is why group engagement in treasures like political theatre is so important. For some, political theatre can be an uncomfortable exposure to a world wholly unfamiliar to their own. Costa Franco and others would argue that this is a good thing. Nay, discomfort should be welcomed. While some members of the audience might find some very explicit descriptions of violence, oppression, and confrontation with hostile military officials to be alien and distant from their lives as Americans, Costa Franco believes that “more subtle themes of censorship, of feeling restrained, might resonate and be relevant in the political moment.” 

She says that with authoritarian regimes on the rise globally, and more people feeling powerless to effectuate change because of the state’s influence in certain aspects of life, the audience could reflect on the freedom, change-making, or lack thereof in their own lives. “Real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity,” while “the virtual world may be more homogenous,” said Robert Putnam twenty-five years ago in his seminal book, Bowling Alone (Putnam, 178). By facing visceral contrasts together, an audience can unearth commonalities otherwise unseen.

Research fellow Marc J. Dunkelman from Brown University and author of The Vanishing Neighbor remarks that, “home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of ‘familiar but not intimate’ relationships with the people who live around us.” That the sphere of people, those who do life beside us though not explicitly with us, are the ones whose value most falls in our eyes. 

“These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” Dunkelman says, “We used to know them well; now we don’t.” Co-existing peacefully with these so-called strangers was the glue to society’s social fabric; now that glue is in peril. 

One recent article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” emphasized that “practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community, isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism.” Purposeful connection with others brings sanity and meaning. Truly, embracing political messages with a diverse new crowd imbues fresh value to strangers. To put it in more vivid terms, it is more common to see others as non-playable characters in our simulation-life, as side characters in our hero’s journey, or even as annoyances in our self-actualization quest.

Embodied theatre in the form of a political play rebels against the urge to consume political messaging alone. Exclusively solitary consumption of such content, though harmless on the outset, can eventually lead to more and more radical or extremist indoctrination without the natural social correction effects that have pervaded human society for generations. 

Unsurprisingly, self-confirming internet rabbit holes, niche podcasts, and YouTube video strings further contribute to today’s hyper-polarization. When told,  “If you like this, you might also like,” we will naturally find a steady sludge of more of the same. And with clips flowing in quick succession, real-life changes rarely follow, nor are they remembered. Some experiences are meant to be standalone and felt in full without a continuous stream to follow. 

Live theatre offers meaningful discontinuity to everyday life. It offers an inflection point with excellence months in the making. It brings real people carrying real stories to our faces. Its resonance flows onward even after the curtains close, passing from the stage to the lobby and out the door. Through more in-person interaction, this isolationist trend can be slowed. Embrace theatre, embrace spots, embrace performances, and embrace in-person comedy shows and theatre. 

The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated an existing track of self-imposed solitude already festering over the decades, but we can work to unlearn those patterns of isolation and embrace public social infrastructure—the theatre as a singularly potent bonding element—wherein each person chooses to break their routine, climb out of their homes, and join with a hundred or more strangers simultaneously for a shared experience. These voluntary gatherings are without immediate economic utility, but serve to make sense of a societal idea with the same age-old human emotions, bringing a unity that cannot be emulated just by watching a video.

When a screen-mediated valence pervades almost every single social interaction, the prohibition of photography and video-taking in theatre settings is a wondrous reprieve. Broadway shows, operas, and plays are perhaps the last events where a no-device policy remains sacrosanct. One must simply soak in the experience for what it is—not a recording of it, but the very memory itself. Such in-person settings bypass the photo-impairment effect, where we remember less when we photograph more. Our memory is outsourced to the digital artifact itself, versus what is loaded from the eyes to the hippocampus. 

What if, instead of consuming continuous streams of content as we do for recreation in a “reels-based” fashion that rarely returns to our recollection, we more often sat in an embodied first-person moment that can only be recalled from memory?

Of course, spending 1.5 hours in the theatre will not reverse the ruthless march of political polarization in this country. But, with a crew of enough people willing to be uncomfortable, pick collective experience with others over another Netflix show at home, our weakest ties will revive. We can deeply sympathize with those who live differently from us but right beside us. Our neighbors might no longer feel so distant. 

Yes, indeed, there is something to be said about these collective experiences, a particularly declining commodity in the modern schema, the unsung hero of American society. Long live live performances of all stripes—from political theatre to football games to outdoor concerts to comedy shows—with go-ers locked in an experience that they will now forever share with the strangers to their right and to their left. With that experience comes a contextual commonality, a sort of “you felt that too, right?” togetherness otherwise reserved for anonymous Reddit threads. 

Art and performances need not be relegated to the periphery of a full life. In fact, it reflects the beauty of what makes us human. No Chat summary can give us that. It’s the intangible. It’s in the rush of an upset in a stadium of 10s of thousands, it’s the pull in the silence after a fermata at Woolsey Hall, it’s in the breath when the lights fade out at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

So come, sit with strangers this spring at I’m Still Here’s debut on April 9. You won’t regret it.

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Works Cited

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Rosen, Christine. The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Soares, Julia S., and Benjamin C. Storm. “Does Taking Multiple Photos Lead to a Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect?” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 29, no. 6, 2022, pp. 2211–18. PubMed Central, PMC9296013. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9296013/.

Thompson, Derek. “The Anti-Social Century: Americans Are Now Spending More Time Alone Than Ever.” The Atlantic, Feb. 2025, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/