A bizarre true story explored through layered fictions.
The Mosinee Project, winner of the 2024 Untapped Award, explores a bizarre true story: a mock-communist invasion staged in small-town Wisconsin during the 1950s. This fascinating premise taps into the pervasive Cold War fears and the paranoia that defined an era of political instability in America, while raising questions about how such fears are constructed and remembered.
A strong ensemble performance is central to this production, with Camilla Anvar, Jonathan Oldfield, and Martha Watson Allpress delivering a confident display of multi-rolling. Their ability to shift between researcher-devisors, 1950s Americans, and an ex-Soviet Union member creates a layered storytelling experience that parallels the fractured nature of historical memory and the shifting perspectives of those trying to investigate the past. They slickly orchestrate the piece’s multi-media elements of live film, projection and a miniature model town, supported by atmospheric sound design and lighting, and a retro ambience.
The piece speculates about the historical figure of Joseph Zack Kornfeder (Camilla Anvar), an Austro-Hungarian immigrant who fled the Soviet Union and Communist Party, leaving his wife and son behind, imprisoned, their fates unknown. Kornfeder is a somewhat enigmatic character, who remains a mystery due to a paucity of archival materials, his motivations and internal world explored, elaborated on and deliberately fictionalised through the show. It’s an interesting yet challenging exercise in trying to render this figure’s story across time, translated between cultures, incomplete records and contemporary bias. The character of Kornfeder is both consultant and architect of this strange experiment to create a fake invasion, mirroring writer, director Nikhil Vyas’ own attempts to recreate this moment in history. Though the reality of Kornfeder’s own brutal yet everyday experiences under communism are largely unheard, ignored, and instead shown to be cosplayed in cartoonish terms by the residents of Mosinee for this strange collective simulation.
The Mosinee Project raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of fear and storytelling – particularly the looming spectre of communism, or at least, the ideological insert of communism that was filtered through an American cultural lens for political intent. At times, this portrayal of communism in the piece felt overly simplistic, stereotypical beyond the intentions of the framing. The production might have delved deeper into the specificities of communism as an idea, compared with the evolutions of its use as a political tool for fear. Moving beyond the US red scare to provide more nuanced conversations and greater resonance for us as a British audience, here and now, navigating a fraught, connected global climate. I was also left somewhat confused about what the piece wanted me to understand and feel about Kornfeder and his goals, between the shifting possibilities of his character. Toward the end, I found some of the alternative narratives jarring, especially their sensationalised tone. The proposed fictional violence and “extremism” felt at odds with the more grounded exploration of Kornfeder’s emotional reality, his displacement and the tension he may have felt with the community around him – a radical departure from caretaking a real man’s life that didn’t land for me.
There’s a lingering sense of uncertainty about the truth that’s thematically effective but inevitably thwarting. What’s happening between the layers of meta-theatricality often felt a bit unclear, leaving the audience to piece together fragments, lost between details and their relevance to the present day – it left me wanting more. To feel more of the humanity of the writer and performers’ drive to understand this surreal moment in the past, specific to a place, and to understand the man behind the story.
Ultimately, The Mosinee Project is a bold, ambitious piece, exhuming Cold War fears, reimagined for the present. While it doesn’t always provide clarity, it raises interesting, complex questions, challenging us as its audience to reconsider narratives told to us, and the stories we retell ourselves. The Mosinee Project is running until 22nd March at the New Diorama Theatre.