How can a play devised by enemies, performed in four locations across a peace wall in the middle of a war zone help provoke lasting peace?

In November 1999, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a community play called The Wedding brought Protestants and Catholics together to rehearse a shared future in the fragile aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. It wasn’t a feel-good arts project. It was risky, volatile, negotiated truth performed in living rooms and kitchen houses on both sides of the peace line.

In this episode, we revisit that moment — not as nostalgia, but as a live question for a divided United States struggling to imagine a coherent democratic future.

In this episode, we explore three critical lessons from Belfast that feel urgently relevant today:

1. Proximity changes people. Intimacy — not abstraction — makes caricature impossible.
2. Shared labor builds trust before shared opinion. Competence together can precede consensus.
3. Hope is not a feeling. It’s a container built through practice. Democracy survives inside structured collaboration, not slogans.

Listen in for a return to Belfast — and a serious invitation to consider what it would mean to rehearse the future together, here and now.

NOTABLE MENTIONS

People

Bill Cleveland

Host of Art Is Change and author of Art and Upheaval.

David Trimble

Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and key political figure in the Good Friday Agreement.

George J. Mitchell

U.S. Senator and American peace envoy who chaired the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement.

Joe Egan

Belfast theater director and key figure in the development of The Wedding.

Martin Lynch

Playwright and co-creator of The Wedding, known for community-based theater work in Northern Ireland.

Organizations & Initiatives

Ulster Unionist Party

Political party central to the post-Agreement negotiations referenced in the episode.

The Good Friday Agreement (1998)

The landmark peace accord that helped end decades of violence known as The Troubles.

Community Arts Forum (CAFÉ)

Belfast-based organization that supported cross-community arts initiatives including The Wedding.

The Shankill–Short Strand Peace Line

One of Belfast’s “peace walls” dividing Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

Publications

Art and Upheaval by Bill Cleveland

Book documenting community-based cultural work in conflict zones, including three chapters on The Wedding.

The Troubles (Northern Ireland conflict)

Historical overview of the 30-year conflict referenced throughout the episode.

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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there. So how can a play devised by enemies and presented in four different places in a war zone help provoke a lasting peace?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community.

There was this moment there when the bus stopped in traffic and someone turned up a portable radio.

We were on our way to a city specific house in a row of what they call kitchen houses in East Belfast, a Protestant house, for the first act in the final performance of a community play called the Wedding that Protestants and Catholics had spent the past year building together. Not easily, but together.

And as we sat there, the Unionist leader David Trimble came on the radio to say that the Ulster Unionist Party have voted to join the new Northern Ireland assembly.

That there has been clear endorsement by the council of the Ulster Unionist Party, namely that we proceed towards dehommission on the basis that decommissioning will follow soon thereafter. Now this clears the stalemate.

A yes vote had nudged a bloody intractable 30 year war story into its next chapter and the bus rolled forward. So I was there that day as a colleague and a witness. And what I saw ended up becoming three chapters in my book, Art and Upheaval.

I wrote about the wedding because I felt like it was something truly rare. A community practicing and performing the future before the politicians fully caught up.

Now, 27 years later, here we are, the so called United States of America playing a strangely similar tune. Another divided country finding it harder and harder to function as a coherent democracy.

Family split communities siloed news feeds, weaponized history disrupted the imagination of a common future in rupture. Which raises the question that feels eerily familiar. If politics can't tell a coherent story, what's culture got to say? Now?

What I witnessed in Belfast was not a feel good arts project. It was a volatile, negotiating, risky, year long act of collective imagination in the middle of a bloody conflict.

It was messy, it was dangerous and it worked. Not because it solved everything, but because it created a structure where enemies had committed to build something together.

In this episode, I want to take you back there, back to the Crown Bar, back to those rows of kitchen houses, back to the buses crossing the peace line. Then I want us to ask very seriously, what would it mean to attempt something like that here?

George Mitchell, the American peace envoy, stands up and says the words that many people had stopped believing they would ever hear.

An agreement had been reached after 30 years of violence, after 3,600 dead, after entire neighborhoods had grown up knowing more funerals than birthdays. It was a miracle. But then, just nine months later, Oma 28 people killed, nine of them children.

A bomb meant to shatter the peace before it had even taken its first steps. But something unexpected happened.

Instead of driving the two sides apart, the depravity of it pushed many people closer to a kind of shared exhaustion. The prospect of peace, however fragile, had become too precious to abandon.

And in Belfast, especially among artists, a question began to hum under the surface. If the politicians are negotiating the future, what are we doing to keep the fragile peace on track?

Now picture the crown bar on great victoria street in Belfast. Smoke thick enough to write in. Guinness on the table. Theater director Joe Egan and playwright Martin lynch sit there staring into the distance.

But Dave hinman, the filmmaker, leans in.

What if you had a different play from every community theater group?

Joe interject.

Jesus, that's a long bloody day.

Well, what if it traveled like a wedding? God, you could do it about a mixed marriage in Belfast.

That's not a romantic comedy, that's dynamite. Then Martin jumps in and closes the loop.

Hey, you know, we could do it in short strand.

Short strand is a small catholic enclave surrounded by a predominantly protestant area, and by that time separated by a 12 foot razor wire wall called the peace line. A wall that did not merely divide territory, but memory, grief, loyalty, and fear. Crossing that line for love was not metaphorical.

It could be dangerous business indeed. And somehow, that's where they decided to begin.

The community arts forum cafe had been working for years in neighborhoods like this, making plays from local stories, staging them in church halls and school auditoriums, giving people a way to hear themselves speak, as Martin would say, always trying to figure out how our art can provide a little peace. So the idea took shape slowly.

A Protestant bride, Catholic groom, Two families struggling, unraveling in parallel, the audience traveling from house to house, literally crossing the line. Two kitchen houses, one protestant, one catholic, Then a church, then a reception hall.

It sounds kind of elegant now, but at the time it was nearly impossible. Before scripts, before casting, before Logistics. There were permissions to negotiate, and not the polite kind.

Conversations with loyalist prisoners, aid conversations with the Short Strand Partnership. Indirect conversations with paramilitary networks that still held sway over who moved where and why. After a bit, though, the nod came.

Representatives from 11 community theater groups gather in a small auditorium at 8:10pm Joe Egan asked everybody to take a seat. And in that instant, the atmosphere shifts. The hum of chatter thins. Eyes scan the room, and in the seconds it takes to sit down, the crowd divides.

Like two families at a shotgun wedding. They are not here to debate politics. They're here to make theater. And so they begin not with speeches, but with stories.

Instead of asking tell us about mixed marriages, Joe asks people to imagine themselves as parents hearing that their son or daughter intends to marry across the divide. Joe gets them to create human wedding arches. And they speak the warnings out loud.

They role play the arguments, and they tell their stories sideways, because direct routes are just too dangerous. Over 100 interviews and conversations like this are recorded and transcribed, and what surfaces surprises even the organizers.

Nearly everyone has a mixed marriage somewhere close in their family. But, and this is the part that cuts. There is no such thing as a real mixed marriage. Once you marry, you become one or the other. Children are lost.

Families fracture. Some leave the country. Some stay and disappear behind that peace wall into silence. There is devastation in these transcripts.

And yet, braided through it all, there's something else. A hunger almost childlike in its simplicity.

A longing for safety, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for something that does not require perpetual, over the shoulder vigilance. The devil, of course, is in the details, which have provoked both violence and paralysis. But the hunger is very real.

Joe Egan once said, in Belfast, it's very hard for people to think so far ahead. Our ability to imagine the future is damaged.

I think that line lands here and now because democracy is not only about policy, it's about imagining what's next together. And when imagination collapses, democracy quietly follows. Back in Belfast, the script writing process is anything but smooth.

The Protestant cast reads early drafts and feels caricatured. The character of Trevor Marshall, a paramilitary uncle with a violent past, feels, well, unbalanced. Why does the violence only show up in our house?

They ask. The tension rises. At one meeting, Protestant Frankie Gallagher finally names the suspicion in the room. We think you are a nationalist.

Marie Jones, one of the playwrights, answers plainly. Well, actually, you're right, I am. And strangely, that honesty clears the air.

Not because everyone suddenly agrees, but because truth has been spoken aloud. The script is revised, not sanitized, not erased, but revised over and over.

So this perpetual work in progress wedding play is not art as a message or propaganda. This is art as negotiated truth, which is to say, a democracy microcosm.

Then, of course, there are the logistics, which begin to resemble choreography written by a madman.

Two buses, audience groups A and B rotating through the two houses, each with with a kitchen scene, a living room scene, and then upstairs to the bedroom scene. One after another, simultaneously at the two sites, scenes are repeated six times per performance, staged, managed by telephone.

Beyond the theatrical gymnastics, some community cast members are warned that their participation might be seen as betrayal. Some drop out, but most stay. And the beat goes on, every line negotiated again and again.

This morning's BBC headline shouts Northern Ireland Talks Too close to call.

The audience boards buses in downtown Belfast and within minutes they're driving past murals heavy with loyalist and Republican slogans and bloody memories onto streets lined with identical kitchen houses. Exiting their respective buses, audiences spill out into narrow streets and line up outside the Protestant Marshall and Catholic Todd houses.

Ten people squeeze into a bedroom in the Catholic house. Surely the groom's sister sits on the edge of the bed and makes a phone call that is rapidly falling apart in real time.

Does it have to do with you and me?

The audience can literally feel her breath. In the kitchen, Damien confronts his father, who tells him he'll never receive proper grace for what he's doing.

Pit of my stomach. You're a deep disappointment to me, boy.

Across the divide in the Protestant kitchen, Sylvia worries that our way of life will get swamped until we're left with nothing. Until he counters that times are changing, that young people are mixing in supper clubs and not stopping to ask who kicks with what foot.

The language is local, the conflict universal. Over the course of three hours, anger and humor and fear and tenderness spill out in cramped rooms where the audience cannot hide.

And by the time they leave for the church, they are no longer observers. They are implicated.

As the bus moves through Belfast towards the play's final act, and the radio announces that the Ulster Unionist Party has decided it's time for Them to take that step toward the peace line. The play and the story on the street become one, and the bus overflows with cheering and applause.

At the reception, the bride's father, Jordi, raises a glass and says, strangers are only friends. We haven't met yet. They are the peace process. They are the future. It would be easy to call that sentimental, but in that room, it lands like oxygen.

The critics love it. The reviews are glowing, but the real review happens on the buses between.

People argue about characters, remember their own family stories, laugh, reflect, question. The transit becomes part of the play, and theater and everyday life churn together.

And of course, this is the part that matters most, because the play does not solve Northern Ireland and violence does not vanish. One cast member's husband is brutally attacked during the run. History does not evaporate, but something does shift.

Protestants and Catholics cross the line together to build something. Not to win an argument, to make something relevant and meaningful. When I left Belfast after those performances, I didn't leave with a blueprint.

I left with something more unsettling and more hopeful. And it stayed with me. First, I came away understanding that proximity, intimacy changes people.

Not dialogue panels, not social media exchanges, not carefully curated listening sessions. Just being close. Proximity, sitting in someone else's living room, hearing their uncle argue, watching their daughter cry.

The wedding, Forced proximity. Physical, emotional, narrative intimacy and a deeply divided community. And that visceral closeness made abstraction impossible.

You can't caricature someone whose breath you can feel in a 12 by 12 bedroom. And in the end, it's harder to hurt someone if you know their story.

Second, I learned that shared labor builds a different kind of trust than shared opinion. Those actors did not agree on politics. They didn't align ideologically, but they had to solve lighting cues together.

They had to time entrances, they had to negotiate those lines, and they had to get audiences safely across hostile territory. They built competence together before they built consensus. And I think that order matters.

And finally, maybe most importantly, I learned that hope is not a feeling. It's a fragile container. The wedding did not inspire peace, but it created a space where peace had to be practiced in real time.

It had deadlines, it had budgets, it had bus schedules, it had egos. And most importantly, it had a shared story that was negotiated painfully and with great, great passion. Hope lived inside the work.

And that may be the deepest lesson for us. If we're waiting for national unity to arrive as an emotional shift, we may be waiting a long time.

But if we build spaces, artistic, civic, communal spaces that are safe enough for divided people to collaborate on something meaningful, something local, something real. Then we begin the hard work of democracy again, not as an ideology or a civics tract, as practice.

The wedding Community play did not end the troubles, but it did something just as important. It expanded the community's capacity to imagine a future together.

And in a time like ours, that capacity may be the most precious civic resource we have. So maybe the question isn't whether we're divided. We certainly are.

The question is whether we're willing to build something together that requires us to stay in the room. And maybe, just maybe, it starts in a kitchen. Artist Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235.

So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.