A brand new production uses an anxiety-inducing score and set to bring audience members face to face with some of America’s classic conspiracies

If you’ve ever toyed with the idea that the CIA might have killed JFK, that Nasa might have faked the moon landings, or that shape-shifting reptilian Illuminati might rule the world – or if you’ve simply ever wondered how anyone else could entertain such ideas – Real Enemies, the multimedia production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave festival, may stoke your conspiratorial embers.

Writer-director Isaac Butler, composer Darcy James Argue and theatrical designer Peter Nigrini have crafted a show that uses music, video and set design to explore the world of conspiracy theories. (The title is drawn from Kathryn Olmsted’s comprehensive history of paranoia in American politics, ranging from the first world war up to 9/11.)



The program, which is divided into 12 chapters, involves very little spoken text. Instead setting, mood and thematic content are conveyed almost entirely through music and visual imagery. When treating the theory that the CIA helped introduce crack cocaine to South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s in order to fund Nicaraguan contras – a notion popularized by the late journalist Gary Webb – Argue establishes a sense of time and place by nodding to LA electrofunk-influenced hip-hop, while footage of Nancy Reagan giving her 1986 “Just Say No” speech lends a dash of video-driven irony to the proceedings.

Real Enemies is not only about particular conspiracy theories, however. It is also about conspiracy thinking as process; about how – and why – people of all races, classes and creeds invent these (sometimes plausible, often outlandish) narratives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Isaac Butler puts on the finishing touches at rehearsals. Photograph: BAM

As such, Darcy says, the show grapples with our fundamental urge to make sense of the world through storytelling, and with the very nature of belief itself; with our genius for finding meaning and order in the universe, and with the comfort that such meaning and order provide.

“It’s really telling that for so many people, it’s more terrifying to contemplate a world full of randomness and chaos than of governmental incompetence and long-standing ineptitude,” he says.

Real Enemies doesn’t just want audiences to understand conspiracy thinking, however. It wants them to engage in it. And it does so by exploiting the same narrative instinct that allows us to connect the dots between seemingly disparate events. This might mean using music that alludes to the unnerving scores of conspiracy thrillers such as The Parallax View, while simultaneously splashing different images on to each of the 15 projection screens arrayed on stage.

“Sometimes,” admits Nigrini, “we intentionally present more information than the audience can digest.” That information overload mixes with elements of conspiracy thinking which pervade every aspect of the production.

Nigrini drew visual inspiration from movies like The Parallax View and The Manchurian Candidate, which used filmmaking techniques to engender a sense of paranoia among viewers. (“If the picture works,” Parallax director Alan J Pakula allegedly told his star, Warren Beatty, “the audience will trust the person next to them a little less.”) He also looked to the work of Stanley Kubrick, a man who was the subject of more than a few conspiracy theories himself.

We intentionally present more information than the audience can digest Peter Nigrini

Argue’s score, meanwhile, which is performed live onstage by his aptly named big band Secret Society, makes extensive use of 12-tone techniques – a set of musical procedures that played an outsized role in American art music during the conspiracy-rich postwar era. (The approach gets its name from the use of a so-called tone row that includes all 12 pitches in the chromatic scale.) Argue suggests that 12-tone music itself came to be the subject of a minor conspiracy theory among composers who felt that the modern classical music scene was dominated by a cabal of 12-tone loyalists.

While orthodox 12-tone music is atonal and notoriously thorny, the archetype of inaccessible avant-garde composition, Argue followed the lead of film composers like Michael Small (Parallax, Klute) and David Shire (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), who bent or ignored 12-tone conventions to craft slick and effective scores. Still, references to the approach are as rife in Real Enemies as secret handshakes at a Masonic convention, from the use of 12 discrete chapters to the presence onstage of a giant doomsday clock that counts down to midnight – an image redolent of doomsday cults, which also get an airing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Butler even designed the show’s narrative arc to evoke the logic of conspiracy theorists, who typically trot out their most plausible assertions (eg, the CIA is hiding something) before introducing their more ludicrous ones (eg, it’s hiding the fact that it tried to kill the president). “Loose Change doesn’t start out by saying that 9/11 was an inside job,” Butler says, referring to a series of documentary films that alleges the US government engineered the terror attacks of 2001.

Similarly, Real Enemies begins with the most credible conspiracy theories –including ones that actually turned out to be true, like the FBI’s plot to infiltrate 60s-era activist groups (Cointelpro) and the CIA’s attempt to develop mind-control techniques by dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD (MKUltra). Only gradually does it ramp up to the loopier ones, such as David Icke’s contention, popular with the tinfoil-hat brigade, that the world is run by shape-shifting reptiles from another dimension.

That kind of slow reveal is, apparently, how conspiracy theorists get you. And it may be how Real Enemies gets you, as well – unless, of course, you’re too clever to fall for such a ruse. Which you are. Aren’t you?

Real Enemies is at BAM’s Harvey Theater, Brooklyn from 18-22 November as part of the Next Wave festival