Cointelshow: A Patriot Act
Inform yourself! Inform on your neighbor!
Follow Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of declassified government surveillance documents. White probes the redacted (blacked-out) texts of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Programs, searching for the words erased in the name of the Freedom of Information Act. But when Chris takes you beneath the redaction marks, into the haunted underworld that lies beneath, things go horribly, fabulously wrong.
Learn fun techniques for the infiltration of activist groups, how to earn benefits and a pension as an agent provocateur, and how to, in the words of J. Edgar Hoover, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” your neighbors! Discover the stories of Chairman Fred Hampton, Dr. Martin Luther King, and many other targets of COINTELPRO!
These are our tax dollars at work, folks; we might as well enjoy it.
This (constantly updated) script has been performed by writer/activist L.M. Bogad in theatres, galleries, labor halls, and community centers for the past 24 years. The pamphlet also includes a preface by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and a companion essay by Bogad about the history of domestic surveillance/harassment, and a “how to” for would-be performers of the script.
Back by popular demand, this new Second Edition adds photos of the original COINTELPRO documents used in the show. There are also many updates to the script: more information, more character development, and more and better jokes, all in the darkly humorous style of the original.
This play is important for activists and apathetics, clergymen and clerks, artists and engineers…all of us, because we all have good reason to ask ‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’ As Bogad makes all too clear, it will have to be us.
—The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno)
One would rarely use the word ‘fun’ to describe something generated from materials obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, but that’s exactly how I’d refer to COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act. Bogad’s hilarious satire teaches us about the gruesome details of COINTELPRO, and connects them to our post-9/11 security state, without preaching, spoon-feeding, or boring the audience.
—Jason Grote
Writer for the TV shows Mad Men, Smash, and Hannibal, and author of the plays 1001, Box Americana, and Civilization (All You Can Eat)