Ro Reddick Doesn't Mind If You Laugh During Cold War Choir Practice

Like most theatre kids, playwright Ro Reddick grew up performing. Except instead of singing in her school musical, Reddick was in a children’s choir singing songs about nuclear war. This was Syracuse, New York, in the late ‘80s; Cold War fears were at their peak and with that, children's choirs around the country were singing about world peace.

“There was definitely a song about us pleading with world leaders to save us from nuclear annihilation,” recalls Reddick. “There were also songs that were just like, ‘Hey, we're all the same, we speak different languages and we're living in different countries, but we're all people.” In other words, don’t blow up the world—for the children.

That children’s choir has been resurrected in Reddick’s play Cold War Choir Practice, currently running Off-Broadway at MCC Theater through March 29. It comes to New York with much fanfare: It’s a remount of a Clubbed Thumb production that got glowing reviews last year, and it won Reddick the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which comes with $25,000. Page 73 is also a co-producer. This remount has also been positively received. 

Cold War Choir Practice follows a Black family living in Syracuse in 1987. There’s 10-year-old Meek, who’s in a choir and who wants a nuclear radiation detector for Christmas. There’s Meek’s dad, Smooch, a former Black panther who now runs the local roller disco. Then there’s Meek’s uncle, Clay, a Republican working for President Ronald Reagan whose wife used to be in a cult. Oh, and it’s all a comedy, with singing from an onstage trio who play various roles throughout the show: choir singers, cult members, Russian spies. It’s a whirling array of influences, but it’s a testament to Reddick’s deft touch that the play isn’t a cacophony of disparate notes. Instead, the twists and turns, and laughs, come fast while cohering into a harmonious whole.

A Cold War comedy may seem unusual, though not to Reddick. “I just come from a family of people who are very funny, who are great storytellers, just hilarious people,” she says with a chuckle. “I went to an experimental theatre program. So Brown’s MFA program is for weirdos. There was never any pressure to not be weird.”

Growing up lower income in Syracuse, Reddick’s family had a grounded view of the Cold War. Reddick was too young to remember much of the ‘80s, but her older brother would have to watch videos in his classroom of what would happen if a nuclear bomb hit America. “He was absolutely terrified after seeing that movie,” recalls Reddick. “But then he came home, and my mom was not at all concerned with the nuclear war, and had a completely different set of very real concerns that were related to survival—but not at all related to nuclear war.”

That dynamic is reflected in the characters of Meek and Smooch in Cold War Choir Practice. While Meek is scared at the thought of Armageddon, Smooch is more concerned with keeping his business open, providing for his family, and surviving within prejudiced America. All the characters are trying to find their own sense of autonomy and control in a world that is chaotic and uncontrollable: “I was interested in what it means to understand your own vulnerability in the face of overwhelming power and just large, structural institutions and forces that you encounter as a child and as an adult,” explains Reddick. “So you have all of these different people … either aligning with or trying to figure out their relationship to powerful groups, or institutions trying to fortify themselves or trying to fortify their community. Everyone's negotiating their relationships to power in different ways.”

Meanwhile, a choir sings original songs, with original lyrics (written by Reddick) such as: “I’m just a child, who stands before you. My only power is to sing my song. Mr. President! Mr. Gorbachev! Lay down your arms!”

An actor for a decade, Reddick pivoted to playwriting during the pandemic, when she found that her acting roles left her uninspired creatively. She began writing Cold War Choir Practice in 2022 while at Brown—the same year Russia invaded Ukraine. And in writing the play, Reddick was also able to place in her own contemporary concerns. As she puts it: “Meek’s anxieties are really adult Ro’s anxiety about what's happening in the world, just put through this filter of the ‘80s.”

It’s seemingly an anxiety that’s shared by the New York theatre scene right now. Running at the same time as Cold War Choir Practice is Mother Russia by Lauren Yee, a comedy about a group of Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Broadway revival of Chess—a musical hyperfocused on the power play between Russia and America. All of these works, straddling comedy and drama, incorporating dance and music, take a subject that is traditionally treated with complete seriousness and inject it with irreverence and hypertheatricality. To Reddick, you need to laugh to keep from screaming.

“Every so often I'll try to write something that's not funny, and it doesn't pull me in and keep my attention the same way as when I'm able to explore dark things through absurdity and humor,” muses Reddick. “It's part of how I process the world, how I process things—it's a part of my art.”

Reddick says her next play, set in a paper factory, will be “a weird little comedy about capitalism with lots of lesbians.” For someone who took a risk in becoming a playwright, including going back to school for it, the success of Cold War Choir Practice has been validating—there truly is an artistic home for Reddick and her unique voice.

“I have very little aversion to risk,” she says lightly. “My mom is more of a gardener than an architect—isn't that how they talk about parents? The architects are like, ‘You must be a lawyer.’ And the gardeners are like, ‘What are you interested in? How can I help you grow and shine?’ Always having grown up poor, I didn't really have anything to lose, I never had a lot of money. It makes it a little easier to jump off the cliff when you don't have a lot of creature comforts. I guess I'm just not risk averse, which is great for this industry.”