Ten years ago on a freezing snowy January day, Greg Wohead and his then partner (two self-professed atheist liberals), visited the home of a traditional Amish couple amongst the cornfields of rural Illinois.
Call It a Day is about that unlikely encounter and the contemporary cultural reverberations of a conversation between the progressive and the traditional, the liberal and the conservative, the artistic and the practical.
This new show explores that remembered conversation in a looped retelling, repeating the idea of the original conversation, attempting to explore the possibility or impossibility of ever really understanding one another across great divides.
Call It a Day is performed by Greg Wohead and three other performers: Tim Bromage, Mireya Lucio and Amelia Stubberfield, who take turns standing in for the four people involved in the original conversation. It unfolds as an exchange that includes linguistic misunderstandings and awkward questions about each other’s lives.
Through these repositionings the audience gets a sense of the queer, the plural. Power structures that reinforce divisions in our society are explored while our complicity in their continuation if confronted.
About the show, Greg says: “I started working on Call It a Day around five years ago when the world seemed a slightly different place,, both on a personal level and a wider cultural and political level. A lot has changed since January 2009, the month Obama was sworn in as President. I remembered the conversation I had with Samuel and Martha Herscheberger—the Amish couple my then partner and I met. I thought about how we often have conversations around tables to try to understand one another, but also push our own worldview or simply express who we are to other people. In what feels like a highly divided cultural and political climate, I wanted to make this show to think about what it might mean to try and understand someone who is coming from a very different—and at times oppositional—point of view.”
Call It a Day is at The Yard Theatre 29th January to 2nd February 2019.
