The ensemble of Winning Is Winning. Photo: Al Foote III

​​How do you think this ends? That’s the question at the heart of Winning Is Winning, a new performance piece conceived and directed by Alec Duffy. JACK, the Brooklyn theater that Duffy co-founded but no longer runs, feels like the perfect venue to host a piece like Winning Is Winning: an exploration of communal action, communal responsibility, and communal despair in our current state of national crisis. JACK, which takes its responsibility as a site for civic discussion and activism as seriously as its artistic mission, works in tandem here with the mission of Duffy’s company, Hoi Polloi, to disrupt and provoke the status quo.

But Winning Is Winning is a sneaky piece of work: we’re led to believe we’re finding communal catharsis, transforming ourselves into some kind of collective primed for action–and the ultimate action/reaction turns out to be something scarier, more hopeless, less useful to address with art at all. How do we think this ends? Is this the theater piece we’re experiencing, the era we’re living through, the Trump presidency, or America at large? The answer to all of those questions is “yes.”

Compiled from text sourced, for the most part, from the Internet since the 2024 presidential election–Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook–but also including 1960s Weather Underground communiques and performed by twenty-plus actors across a range of age, race, gender, vocal quality, body type, physical ability, Winning is more an embodied word cloud than anything like narrative: it’s a mouthpiece for the ideas and emotional reactions that comprise the zeitgeist. There’s intentionality in the collaging and construction, of course, but no directed sense of character in any of the people nor a sense of connection between them. In creating a distillation of the Internet, one of the clever things Duffy does is use a hum or murmur of collective reaction to certain statements as a kind of aural representation of social media “chatter”–an actor lobs an opinion or a reaction out into the crowd and it’s met with a tone that almost feels like a vocal equivalent of “likes” and other reactions.

Beginning with the entire cast frozen mid-silent-shriek, the piece for most of its duration hits the emotional notes one might expect from a bunch of Brooklyn avant-garde theater artists: rage, despair, fear, vulnerability, uncertainty; deep emotion mixed with cynical musing; forced cheerfulness set against pained apathy; sardonic instructions for self-care alongside willed ignorance. Dan Safer’s choreography hits a variety of stylistic notes, from sharp, angsty modern to uninhibited club dance to yoga; the music (some found, some composed by Steven Leffue and sound designer Brendan Connelly) likewise draws on a variety of sources and moods. 

Duffy and Safer have often done exceptional physical work together; there’s often as much in how characters hold their bodies and move and cycle through facial expressions as in anything they say. (I think particularly of last year’s Family, where the inherent grotesquerie in the story was amplified by the movement styles.) Here, the way the ensemble deploys themselves around the space–as one big sculptural shape in the middle; slumped against the far wall; in a circle–always conveys context and meaning, always tells us something about the shape of the group.

There is a shared catharsis in sitting together in a soundscape of public opinion, hearing the things you’ve maybe thought and maybe not posted about bubble up; hearing the impossibly long sustained scream that issues out of one of the performers; watching people work out their fear and rage in a physical collective. But Duffy is doing something a little more complicated, a little more provocative, then just letting us liberals feel heard. Toward the end of the piece, we settle into a single character for a long monologue that seems to reprise so much of the advice that you hear in leftist activist circles about rooting practice in your local community, about making offline connections to revitalize your sense of purpose and commitment. Except here, that community is gun-owning doomsday preppers, marshaling their skills and resources ahead of disaster. 

And just as we settle into the cognitive dissonance of that–which is also a tiny bit seductive to the audience because it’s the first time in the show that we’ve sat with a character for more than a line or two–there’s a pounding on the door, the lights come up, and the harshest kind of intervention from the current regime–an ICE raid–breaks into the piece. 

I saw the closing performance, so a spoiler alert may be moot–but even with the risk of spoilers, the show comes off as sounding more theoretical and precious than it is if you leave out the short, sharp shock with which it ends. A room full of people who’ve been displaying their reactions and their opinions and their physical freedom for ninety minutes, and they–and we in the audience–stand stock still while our shared fiction is punctured. No one says anything. No one intervenes. The doors swing open and we all sit there in an uncomfortable silence trying to figure out what we could have done differently, realizing how badly we answered that opening question. 

I wanted to find hope in Winning Is Winning, and I think its seduction is that it leads you to believe that you might–or if not hope, at least a blueprint for action. In the end, it rips even that comfort away. But alongside the memory of how I felt at the end of the piece, I also take a memory of the physical trust the ensemble has in one another, their care and their carefulness with one another up until the ending. There’s no set to this piece, but there is one chair–because one of the actors has some physical limitations that mean he can’t sit and sprawl on the floor when much of the company does. The entire company participates in moving that chair around, making sure their colleague has it where and when he needs it. I want to believe that spirit will help us out of this dark time, but I’m not sure I do.