The November 23, 2016 New York Times interview with Donald Trump was an extraordinary piece that revealed much about our media and its relationship to the then-new president. The choral reading of the transcript of that interview, which we called “Mediacracy” and presented on January 9, 2017 at Theatre 54 in New York City as a benefit for ProPublica, was meant to illuminate the conflicts in the ways that media works in our contemporary political climate and the ways that it limits the subjects and perspectives of our discourse. A recording of the performance was subsequently streamed on NowThis News on January 17, 2017. It was viewed by over 350,000 people.

The text was split up amongst twelve female and ethnically diverse performers—it was sometimes read by an individual, sometimes by a small group of three or four, and then occasionally by all twelve in unison. There was no attempt at vocal mimicry, and the chorus members spoke the text clearly and plainly, without much emotional or psychological affect. This created the indelible effect of taking Trump’s voice away from him and allowing us to hear his words differently. It also did the same with the voices of the reporters and editors, complicating the easy differentiation of identity and character and making clear that both the form (the media context) and content (Trump’s rhetoric) were under the critical microscope for the spectators.

In large part because the voices were female and represented a diversity of ethnicities, there was also a sense of resistance to the text itself, especially when speaking Trump’s words from the interview. These were clearly not their voices, but the embodiment of other voices, voices that have been heard and are being heard, being embodied by those who are now even further from being heard and heeded with a Trump administration—those who are not silent and will not be silent, and will not be caught up in another’s narrative. The reading ended with all of the women standing and coming forward, then throwing their texts to the ground as the lights went out.