By Jessie Seigel / August 4, 2024
N/A by Mario Correa is playing at the Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater
I am currently working on a play in a short residency at Millay Arts. So, it seems a good time to put the nation's very current daily political uproars aside for a moment. Instead--never putting politics completely aside--I will address a political play that I saw in New York last month. In its title, N/A, the N stands for Nancy Pelosi and the A for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (often referred to as AOC).
In the playbill, the playwright, Mario Correa, stated "I wanted to write about a battle of ideas; the philosophical and strategical disagreements that have placed two historical figures seemingly at odds, despite shared values and objectives." Through this very well written and acted two-character play, Mr. Correa has succeeded beautifully.
The play introduces us somewhat to the individual personal histories that inform Nancy Pelosi's and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's views as well as some of their conflicts. But, most essentially, Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez are used as vehicles to express the tension
between the pragmatism needed to get any progressive legislation passed in Congress and the need, sometimes, to move progress forward by refusing to compromise and using defeat to educate and obtain attention for what is truly needed--Thus, over time, changing hearts and minds. At one point in the play, Pelosi is unhappy with AOC because she voted against a bill that would have provided some progressive relief. Pelosi's view being that one progresses step by step--you get what you can in the moment and build on that to get more. AOC's reaction is that the legislation would have merely given the impression of progress while really just accepting a crumb that accomplished next to nothing rather than insisting on the truly needed comprehensive change.
In my view, both approaches are needed. If you don't have someone who refuses to compromise and pushes for something more extreme, you won't accumulate the pressure that permits you to obtain the compromise. (It is a technique that right-wing Republicans used to push the nation's center further and further to the right.) As my mother once observed, if, during the Depression of the 1930s, the country had not had communists pushing for extreme changes, the nation would never have gotten the progressive programs instituted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.
N/A, starring Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe, is playing at the Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through September 1, 2024.
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