Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer has pulled back the veil of fiction from reality again with another compelling production, FERGUSON, the Play, which exposes the truth of what really happened in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. McAleer provided an exclusive piece to The Daily Wire about how the play is now being released on film, and spoke to The Daily Wire to provide further details on the production.
Q: What inspired you to produce it [FERGUSON the Play]?
A: Well, I think there’s been a lot of stories, a lot of media, about Ferguson and Michael Brown. It’s clear to me that no one’s actually read the grand jury testimony, or read even a lot of it, and it’s 5,000 pages, so as journalists it’s our duty to read these things and try to tell the truth about what’s happened. So I decided to do that. The way to communicate most efficiently and most entertainingly, in a way that people would pay attention to, was in a play to have people actually speak the words of those eyewitnesses. And that’s why I wrote the play, because it’s compelling when you hear truth coming out of people’s mouths. Obviously a play is very restricted in that you have to go to the theater to see it, so that’s why I decided to film the actors reading the script and put it online at The Daily Wire because that’s the way that so many more people will get to see the truth about what happened in Ferguson on that morning.
Q: How did you come up with the concept with having the whole play be entirely nonfiction to the point where all the lines were exactly as they were from the grand jury testimony?
A: Verbatim theater is a relatively well-known and common type of theater in the U.K., where I’m from; I’m from Ireland, across the Atlantic. There’s been a long history of verbatim theater; public tribunals, court cases, etc. are issues of importance that were in a public forum. The most famous of all was the Bloody Sunday tribunal, where there was a massacre by the British army and then there was a tribunal into it that lasted two years, so they distilled two years of testimony about this one incident that happened in a morning in Northern Ireland and then distilled it into a play using only verbatim testimony. And, you know, I thought that this was a perfect example. This is shaping up to be America’s Bloody Sunday. It’s a very important event in recent American history, and I wanted to get the truth about it out there before a bunch of untruths ran ahead and became facts when they weren’t facts.
Q: How were you able to condense the entire grand jury testimony into 90 minutes?
A: I wanted a lot of eyewitness testimony, that’s most important. I wanted a lot of forensic testimony and scientific testimony because that’s important, too, and I wanted it from all points of view from all sides. I have people there who are claiming that Michael Brown did put his hands up and say “Don’t shoot!” and I have people who say, “That couldn’t have happened, that didn’t happen,” eyewitnesses saying it didn’t happen, scientific and forensic evidence saying it didn’t happen. So I wanted to get a range of eyewitness accounts but I wanted also to show what happened to those eyewitness accounts when they were put under the glare of under-oath questioning and the glare of science and the glare of forensics and the glare of all the contradictory eyewitness account. Very often they’re put under the glare of simple physics, with investigators saying, “You say you saw this from that window. It is physically impossible to see that from this window.”
Very often, these witnesses told the media this fantastic story that fit into the media narrative, but when they went into the grand jury they completely changed their story. I thought that was unfair to the world, it was unfair to the media audience, that these people were saying something on a news program and then saying something completely different when they were under oath under the fear of perjury. I thought it was important to show this contradiction and these inconsistencies. I also wanted to create a dramatic run-up to this event because it’s a very dramatic event, so I wanted to get as many eyewitnesses, point of view, it’s almost like a minute-by-minute, step-by-step account of the death of Michael Brown, and I wanted it to be that.
Q: You said in your piece this morning there were nine people who walked out on your play last year, in one case 24 hours before. Could you explain exactly what happened with that and how you were able to pull together a new cast of members so quickly?
A: Nine actors walked out because when they read the script, when they read eyewitness accounts of what happened to Michael Brown. It didn’t match with what they wanted it to say and they wanted me to change the script to match their opinions. All very well, but sorry, you don’t get to change people’s eyewitness testimony. I’m offering you this great role, you say you’re a courageous actor, your colleagues give you awards that say you’re courageous actors. Show some courage. That’s what I want, show some courage and actually take a role that may make your friends think again, that they make society think again. Take a role that makes a difference, don’t take a role that all your friends agree with. Take a role that challenges them.
But when it came down to it, these nine actors weren’t able to do that, they didn’t have courage. They talk about being brave actors; I found very little bravery in these actors. They walked out and I had not added one paragraph; I had not added one line. They wanted to give a voice to the people of Ferguson, actually. They wanted to voice the concerns of activists, racial activists and elites that were pushing this story. But they weren’t allowing ordinary people of Ferguson who saw this in real time to have a voice, and that’s sad, actually. That’s sad.
Q: So how were you able to pull together a new cast of members so quickly, since it was roughly a week before the play was being put into production?
A: Well, it was a staged reading, so that meant we didn’t have as much rehearsal time as there would be for a full play, but also, I was crowd funding. I crowdfunded it, so I was able to raise money and go out, cast a wider net. A lot of actors volunteered their services because some actors saw what happened. They thought, “I need to step in here and actually make sure this play goes ahead.” So, you know, hard work. We had a great casting agency as well, we were able to use their experience and their depth of their knowledge to find actors who were willing to perform.
Q: How has the play been received so far?
A: Very well. As you can see, from a lot of the reviews, people find it very compelling and the truth of course is compelling. That was one thing I noticed in the actual theater when the play was on, the audience was behaving more assertively than any other audience I had ever seen in a play: they were hanging on every word. Quite often, the audience sits back at a play and absorbs what’s said, and for FERGUSON they were leaning forward, not wanting to let a single word [get by] because they knew every word was genuine, every word was a genuine word uttered by a real person about a very important issue, so they didn’t want to miss a word. And, you know, the critics seem to really like it; I’m hoping that people will comment on the YouTube section or comment on The Daily Wire, I’m keen to hear what people think about FERGUSON the Play as it is.
Q: Do you have any live performances coming up?
A: No, I’m hoping this filming of FERGUSON will attract some attention and people will want to put it on across America, maybe bring it to New York. Also, I want to bring it to Ferguson, MO. I think the people of Ferguson who weren’t in the grand jury, who haven’t took the time to read 5,000 pages of grand jury testimony, will want this to be shown in their community and encourage it to be shown in their community, and maybe they could put it on in their community, because everyone deserves the truth but the people of Ferguson particularly deserve the truth.
Q: What’s the one thing you want people to take away from watching this play?
A: That the story they initially heard about Michael Brown’s death is mostly bogus. There are so many parts of the story that’s out there that are bogus and that’s not me saying that; that’s eyewitnesses from Ferguson saying that, and many of them are black eyewitnesses. Many of them are African-American who bravely stood up and challenged the view that elites were pushing, the view that the racial entrepreneurs were pushing. They said, “No this is what I saw, this is what happened.” The truth needs to be told.