Project Unspeakable

Project Unspeakable

Douglas Wilson
144 Leshure Road
Rowe MA 01367
413 339-4468
dougw@rowecenter.org

Karen Rehmus
273 Shelburne Line Road
Colrain MA 01340
413 624-3025
projectunspeakable@gmail.com

I want to share an exciting theatrical project I’ve become involved with and I’m helping promote. It’s called Project Unspeakable and was inspired by Jim’s amazing workshop and Ginny Cunningham’s excellent play, Noah’s Arc, that was presented on Saturday night of the workshop.

Project Unspeakable envisions hundreds of dramatic readings or full performances all over the country, and perhaps abroad, on November 22, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.

We plan to use personal contacts and as well as the internet to reach out to religious, civil rights, activist, and theatre groups around the country to encourage them to schedule staged readings and performances of the Project Unspeakable script on the 50 birthday or assassination date of one of the four leaders within the 12 months following November 22nd. Martin Luther King’s birthday will be celebrated January 20

This kind of project has notable and very successful precedents. One I remember was Dan Berrigan’s Trail of the Catonsville Nine during the American Invasion of Southeast Asia. The Laramie Project. a play about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming gay student, played all over the country. The Lysistrata Project, based on Aristophanes’ Greek play Lysistrata about women in Athens who refuse to have sex with their husbands until the men stop making war, had 1,029 readings in 2003 before the American invasion of Iraq. And Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologue has been performed by theatre, school, and community groups thousands of times all over the world.

We believe it is time that the American people begin to challenge the silence that has surrounded these four assassinations for decades – the silence of The Unspeakable. We are doing this not just to reveal the truth about who murdered these leaders and why, but to shed light on the “unspeakables” of today – the official cover-up of crimes that have led to the multiple wars and the economic and ecological crises our country and the world are facing.

Please feel free to contact me or Karen about this project. We would love to hear from you.

Thanks, and best wishes,
Doug Wilson for the Project Unspeakable Steering Committee
Court Dorsey, Cheryl Fox, Randy Kehler, Karen Rehmus, & Doug Wilson

P.S. You will note that this is snail mail. Hey, I’m old fashioned, but I also believe that people often don’t read long emails. I believe this is very important and want you to read it, and hope you will forward copies of this Project Description to individuals and groups you think might be interested in participating in or supporting Project Unspeakable. It is my intention to send you an email with this information, using the modern communication methods that are now common, in a few days so you can forward it easily.