Review: The Mosinee Project

It’s May 1, 1950, and a small town in the midwest of America has been overtaken by communists. They’ve set up barbed wire barricades, jailed locals, and taken the mayor hostage. The Mosinee Project is a Cold War drama tracking the two-month countdown of events leading up to this strange and fatal day.

Counterfactual, recipients of this year’s Edinburgh Untapped Award, are the company behind a show that takes a sideways look at a bonkers moment in time. With just three people on stage at any one time, the cast switch between the key players with ease as the Mosinee townsfolk prepare for a fake invasion from former-communist-turned-fake-current-communist Joseph Zack Kornfeder. There’s confusion in the town as the event spirals from an educational family day out to its unfortunate end.

The Mosinee Project is beautifully staged. A red-tinged video feed projects live, giving the show an overall sense of uncanniness, as do real extracts from Kornfeder’s diary detailing his thought process as the event slips ever further from his grasp. Now is a fitting time for a show that explores political control, authoritarianism and societal manipulation, and The Mosinee Project should make you think hard about who tells us what to fear, and why.