DÉSIRÉE DOVE AND MIA FAIRFIELD-MALHOTRA ON THE PROSPECT FARM STREET THEATRE

By Adelaide

Recorded on November 1, 2051 in the Vale of Cashmere. 

Adelaide: Hello, this is Adelaide, and I’m going to be having a conversation with two of my dear comrades-in-story, co-founders of the Prospect Farm Street Theatre (PFST). I’m here with Désirée Dove and Mia Fairfield-Malhotra, and we’re gathered today in the Vale of Cashmere in Brooklyn, New York. The three of us agreed that I’d begin the interview with a brief outline of the PFST’s production history, so our conversation can focus on how we developed and sustained the organization, as well as what we see as contributions of the project to our present. We know that few of our neighbors have theatre on their mind. We are fighting and dying alongside you all. The Cough has decimated our communities, and we all know dismantling the NYPD occupation must be our first goal. But we feel like it’s important to look back at the forties with some really sharp eyes—and to share what we recently achieved together for the archive. As we look ahead, we can’t pretend to be optimistic. The darkness is truly overwhelming here, and we know we have already survived so much and lost so many. We watch with admiration as our siblings around the planet rise up. From the Levant to the Andes, we’ve seen how infrastructures of cultural production under the most dire circumstances of oppression have transformed over decades into insurrectionary victory. And, while we made a decision to stop making plays together on New Year’s Eve, 2049, we know that these last two years have demonstrated the continued need for us to resist creatively together: to learn, to tell radical stories, to imagine different endings.

Dove: Honey, get to the plays. We want to talk too, you know?

Adelaide: Sorry, you’re right. I’m getting carried away. I’m just so excited to see you both. Okay, just taking a look at my —

Fairfield-Malhotra: Us too, babe. We’re actually here! The Vale is still so spooky and magical. Do you remember opening night of Juicy, juicy —

Adelaide: Of course, but I was thinking if we start with the strike —

Fairfield-Malhotra: Fineeee, but you know we never once wrote a linear plot, and I can’t help it. That night changed my life.

Dove: Girl, if you don’t let her talk! 

Fairfield-Malhotra: Okay, okay. But we have to talk about that play.

Adelaide: Cert, love. We’ll get there. I’m gonna be quick. We all met at that demo at the apartment complex across from Riverside Cathedral. Columbia owned everything in sight, and they were foreclosing on dozens of families in that building. Maybe, Mia, would you want to say a little bit about UTW?

Fairfield-Malhotra: The Union of Theater Workers was formed after the first siege. The tourist bubble had burst and was never going to come back the same way. Losing the fly-ins from California and the Midwest when domestic air traffic went down was one thing, but once we lost New Jersey audiences all of us working in theater at the time knew—and the producers knew we knew—it wasn’t going to be long before this anachronistic hang-on of New York’s golden age was going to collapse entirely. UTW tried to keep things hanging on for all of us with protections and benefits that we’d never dreamed of as actors—and it was so, so tempting to be seduced by the stability.

Adelaide: Désirée, do you want to add anything?

[Very long pause.]

Fairfield-Malhotra: Dési?

Dove: Well, is she going to ask me to introduce myself, or what? I thought this was an interview. A real woman demands an introduction.

Fairfield-Malhotra: Yes, sis! The drama, we live for her! 

Adelaide: [laughing] Obsessed with you, both of you. I’ve missed you soooo much! Alright then, queen, let’s get the real story - the story of an icon. Ms. Dove, wouldn’t you please spin us a little web?

Dove: I thought you’d never ask. Call her by her name, for she is your very own resident diva, your favorite leftist’s favorite Broadway actress, Désirée Dove. Désirée Dove, who gained infamous prominence for her legendary viral roast of a fash politico, in which she called the mayor “slop slime, the greatest of all time.” Désirée Dove, determined abolitionist who organized Black Trans Freedom Papers and posted exorbitant bail bonds for years. Désirée Dove, who won the Tony on the ninetieth anniversary of those vile awards. May it be known that she gave thriving under capitalism a TRY, children.

[Adelaide and Mia applaud, giggling uproariously.]

Adelaide: Incredible, thank you. Let me catch my breath. Mia, would you explain a bit 

about how we started studying together?

Fairfield-Malhotra: After I got back from visiting my grandparents in New Delhi, I needed to tell the two of you absolutely everything about Jana Natya Manch — the People’s Theatre Front. I was there for New Year’s Day, 2039, the fiftieth anniversary of Safdar Hashmi’s assassination, and Janam returned as they did each year to the site of his murder to perform the interrupted play.

It was devastating and extraordinary. I was pretty shaken. Safdar had been thirty-four when he was killed; I had turned thirty-four in October right when I arrived to visit my grandparents. I couldn’t believe Halla Bol, this play about raising hell in the previous century was still so relevant, that this volunteer theatre company had lasted through it all for more than five decades, that even listening in my broken Hindi I could feel the power of this message. And there were just… So. Many. People. But everyone knew every word. Thinking about it still makes me emotional.

Dove: You were a new woman when you got back. Focused. Clear.

Fairfield-Malhotra: Truth. I feel like that started to change the course for all of us. I mean, we were still just kind of trying to make it through. We knew we weren’t exactly engaged in revolutionary activity, but honestly, it was like, whatcha gonna do? I mean, as Désirée Dove would say —

All: Burn the dollar, but spend it first!

[Silence as they reflect.]

Dove: Wow. Hate that! Yeah, it’s true. We were all pretty much just biding our time, and living our little self-centered lives, and trying not to die of despair — or the cycles of respiratory pandemic.

Adelaide: Mia, you’re quiet. Do you want to share what you asked us when you got back?

Fairfield-Malhotra: I said: “we have to make theatre for the streets.” And you bitches just … didn’t believe me when I said we could do it. Or maybe you didn’t know what it could be?

Dove: We were jaded. We were like, theatre’s dead, we need revolution.

Adelaide: Or, for me, I just thought it was impossible to make people pay attention here. At the start of the forties? Please, people barely left their apartments or turned off their digits in those days. 

Fairfield-Malhotra: You were a hard crowd, for sure. I don’t know. It would have been so easy to not push it, and be like, okay, they don’t get it. But I knew I couldn’t do it alone, and I knew each of you well enough, even then, to really feel like we could say something with a mass political and poetic appeal. I felt so clear that I just had to plant the seed and that something would grow.

Dove: Yep. But girl, you also can’t leave out Jenin. If I hadn’t gone to The Freedom 

Theatre, we wouldn’t have —

Fairfield-Malhotra: I obviously didn’t forget, diva. I’m just telling my part. But leave it to Désirée Dove to always put her —

Adelaide: Ladies, ladies! We’re going to tell everyone’s story. I don’t know, maybe me thinking we could do this as a group interview was silly, but—can we just take a second? Can you look around at this place we’ve loved and fought for? Can you breathe with me?

[Silence, except breath, as they reset.]

Dove: Goddesses, nothing so relaxing as a beautiful crone telling you to shut up.

Adelaide: That’s beautiful old crone to you, my dear. 

Dove: Mia, I love you, sis.

Fairfield-Malhotra: I love you, too. Tell us about Palestine.

Dove: I heard about the Freedom Theatre for the first time about six months into the genocide in Gaza, sometime in 2024. I was seventeen at the time of the Al-Aqsa Flood, and my friends and I were just… in our little theatre classes watching massacre after massacre on Instagram. It was horrifying. And I just remember all four years of college learning everything I could about Palestine and how art was resistance there: dabke, and tatreez, and—and then when Jenin was raided right before they were going to premiere a play about October 7, that’s when I learned the word intifada.

I was watching this clip from that old leftist news show—Democracy Now!—where an actor from The Freedom Theatre, Motasem Abu Hasan, he kept saying “it’s a cultural intifada, it’s a cultural intifada.” He really believed so deeply that the reason the whole world was rising up with the Palestinians, the reason so many youth in the West were protesting Israel’s crimes was a result of the decades-long cultural intifada. That really stuck with me, for a very long time, until now, and definitely shaped the way I thought about what we wanted to do with PFST.

Adelaide: And then, after Palestine was liberated—

Dove: Yes, I visited a free Jenin in 2040! After I won the Tony, I was tired of acting in plays written by others. I became interested in telling my own story, and this was also when I was becoming more radicalized, and I started wondering how I was going to use these skills I was getting applauded for to uplift my own community. Eventually, Mia introduced me to Theatre of the Oppressed, and we made two shows with girlies coming home. They loved it, and we learned a lot, and we raised some bail money, but the fash shut us down real fast.

Adelaide: Maybe let’s not talk too much about what happened after that.

Dove: Bitch, do you think I’m dense? Like I was saying—when I had to go on the run, my friend smuggled me onto the barge she was working on. Worst months of my fucking life. We were near Tunis when the invasion of Iran began, and I was so seasick, and my friend and I were like fuck, this for real. We stole a life-raft in the middle of the night and floated until morning; thank goddesses for those sailors. They asked us where we were going, and we hadn’t talked about it at all, but we just looked at each other and said, “to free Palestine!”

We didn’t know what to expect—there was so much misinformation and propaganda in the U.S. during the years of the uprisings, like how they used to talk about Cuba when we were teens, Mia, except it was so much harder by the end of the thirties to get any global news at all, let alone accurate or left reporting.

It took my breath out of my chest, arriving in Gaza at that moment, so soon after the border walls fell. The hugs, the food, the songs, the love.

About a month after we landed, The Freedom Bus came to Rafah. After I saw playback theatre for the first time, I couldn’t help but flaunt my background a little, and then they invited me to teach a workshop in Jenin at the theatre school.

It was the youth program that changed my life, though. I had never seen something like that, with storytelling so embedded in a place and a community. I knew from the interviews that they had rebuilt the theatre soooo many times during the occupation. Month after month and year after year, responding to Israeli raids by rebuilding again and again.

Coming from my experience—winning capitalist theatre’s biggest awards but perpetually struggling to get by in New York—it was like, how could you possibly sustain a cultural institution without a massive endowment, let alone in conditions of genocide? But they had done it despite it all, for decades.

Now, elders who had been children in the first intifadas would begin every rehearsal by telling a story of one of their peers who had been martyred. When the children began to cry, they would all sing together, and when the music had eased the circle’s grief, they would ask the children to stand, enter the stage, and begin a scene by imagining how they’d contribute to the commune when they grew up.

Adelaide: You really brought that idea to PFST—that we had to be led by children.

Dove: You’re right. We each brought a touchstone from our own paths. Mia brought us street theatre to begin with. I knew we needed to tell stories that came from the lives of young people. You brought the concept of food-lore. Want to share a bit about that?

Adelaide: Right, okay. Désirée, you’re making me realize—interviews on Democracy Now! in the early months of the Gaza genocide are a big part of my path to PFST, too. In December 2023, when Jenin was attacked, Amy Goodman interviewed Ahmed Tobasi, less than a week after The Freedom Theatre was raided while he was artistic director. He was interviewed with Peter Schumann, the co-founder and director of Bread & Puppet. That interview was the first time I learned about their anti-war activism during Vietnam in the 1960s. Sometime during the sprint of those first couple years of genocide, my friend and I were in New Bedford to meet up with another crew organizing for divestment, and Bread & Puppet was there on tour, and we saw The Obligation to Live. I had been numb for many, many months. The Brass Band allowed me to weep.

I became really curious about longevity. How do radical Left theater companies endure? The next spring, I followed my curiosity to the Northeast Kingdom. Peter was ninety-two—and actually, I was thirty-four. His daughter, Maria Schumann, led us apprentices in creating a ritual on the farm. We sang each morning to the mountains and we dressed in red and we ate Peter’s rye pumpernickel and brie and apples and we called the birds and — well, anyway, it broke my spirit open. We rehearsed for four days and then on Saturday eighty people arrived, and we taught them the songs we had been learning, and we had a battle between winter and spring, and we took them into the Pine Forest—where puppeteers have offered memorials for decades, and we made a memorial to Iran, and Lebanon, and Palestine: “For those who were learning. For those who were living. For those who were home. For those who are fighting.”

I was really moved by this community of artists grappling so deeply with being alive at that time. And the legacy of solidarity with The Freedom Theater was everywhere. I remember tearing up when I found a “Long live the cultural intifada!” banner nested behind piles of cardboard and bulk ingredients. I was there when Donald Trump said “a civilization will die tonight,” and we read The Revolution’s Promise, and I didn’t have service, and there were so many puppets, and you could feel the thousands and thousands of people who had come to the circus, and I kept wondering what it would take to build the conditions again for street theatre in the proto-fascist U.S. of A.

Those questions got buried for a long time, you know, beneath all the junk of being trans as the fash rose to power and made us the punching bags of their culture wars.

Fairfield-Malhotra: But sometimes when life buries our influences, they’re still guiding us along —

Dove: Until we encounter the people we need to help us unearth them.

Adelaide: This feels like a good moment to note that it was almost five years of developing friendship, and three years of somewhat consistent study that the three of us were doing together before Mia brought back up the idea of us forming the theater. And, it was only after we had all shared these different inspirations with one another that we really started thinking about what we wanted to make together.

Mia, would you share a bit about how we all came to the Vale?

Fairfield-Malhotra: When the city’s parks department shut down, green spaces across the city were no longer being maintained, and the police surveillance increased ten-fold as more and more people who were houseless began decentralized encampments. So, this place had become a bit of a frontline for several years, and in the spring of 2042, it was hot as hell. I don’t know if any of us were prepared to sweat that much, and so many water sources were contaminated, and the quality of available food was getting worse and worse. Life in New York City was pretty fucking miserable.

You’d had this idea, Adelaide, of the vegetable as metaphor—organizing messages in code, caricatures of the fash in disguise.

Dove: “Pocket a seed from every scene, if you can read between the lines.”

Adelaide: We didn’t have Peter’s sourdough to propagate revolutionaries — but we had the seeds you were gifted in Palestine.

Dove: And that I gifted to you both, and that Mia rudely re-gifted to you.

Fairfield-Malhotra: Sister, you know perfectly well I didn’t know anything about growing food back then! Anyway, I remember it was April, and we were walking around the lake bed, and aunty was telling us about how dozens and dozens of turtles used to show up there every spring. I honestly couldn’t quite imagine it. Here was this nearly dried-up, huge hole in the ground, and Adelaide’s eyes were glossed over. You kept saying, “there used to be so many turtles.”

Adelaide: I’d forgotten that. They had slowly siphoned all the water for data centers. Okay, sis, I think we’ve reached your moment. Want to tell us about Juicy, juicy snap peas?

Fairfield-Malhotra: [impersonating Désirée] I thought you’d never ask!

Dove: And she says I’m the drama.

Fairfield-Malhotra: That summer, we were talking about this sharpening contradiction between scarcity and abundance. We wanted people to really feel like we could open up more resources for ourselves as the systems around us offered us less and less of the comforts of late-stage capitalism, as we all teetered on the brink of more and more possibility for competition to turn quite ugly. 

You had planted snap peas and carrots and corn in a circle around the Vale with the idea that each summer there’d be a sort of living fence, a little privacy. You were sleeping with a polycule who were doing this DIY water treatment process, so I’d come by and see you on your hands and knees, singing to the seeds and diligently watering “your fence” — we both thought you were a little nuts, crawling around this circle of soil — with these little mason jars of clean water you’d bring back from your sleepovers.

Dove: In July, the plants must have been 6 feet high. I couldn’t believe that. I felt like I was in a fairy tale, stepping through the peas to the other side to find you basking in the sun, wearing this sleeveless gown. One day, you showed me how to check a pea for ripeness. And when I popped it in my mouth, I said —

Together: “Damn, these things are juicy, juicy!”

Fairfield-Malhotra: We all burst out laughing and fell to the ground in a cuddle pile. I looked at Dési, and Dési looked at Adelaide, and we just — we knew.

Dove: And soon, your vision of the Prospect Farm Street Theatre began to sprout!

Fairfield-Malhotra: Within a couple months, we got clear on the mantra. Four compass points for every play:

Together: “We write towards the North star of communization, singing songs of total freedom.”

Fairfield-Malhotra: “Our voices will be carried on the wind. Facing East, a revolutionary poetics will rise over the streets like the sun.”

Adelaide: “Stories from the liberated South will nourish the soil of empire’s demise. In the belly of the beast, we will grow vegetables and make art at the same time.”

Dove: “Each new generation will take us further from the violence of the wild, wild 

West. Can you hear the children cackle?”

That was important to us from jump. The plays had to be funny. We didn’t want this to be dry demagoguery.

Adelaide: You really set the bar of that for us, Désirée, telling us about The Freedom Theatre and the laughs you shared there.

Dove: Those kids were cracking each other up! Cracking me up! And, the connective tissue within the camp was so clearly connected to these theatre exercises engendering sumud; the youth were so alive with this generational steadfastness inherited from collective resistance to genocide and now facing the challenge of building something brand new, a liberated society.

If we were going to be asking people to gather, take this serious risk of being in a huge crowd in a subway station or at the corner of an intersection, probably surrounded by fash or police, we knew we wanted to cut through that with shared laughter.

Fairfield-Malhotra: We also were having so much fun together. Being trans theatre artists, in the old system, it just felt so tiring and terrible. But this was ours.

Dove: We started writing as often as we could. For months, we had these abstract, political concepts, like an idea of a plot where the many overtook the few. But we couldn’t quite crack it, until we realized that the answer was a fable of the abundance of the peas themselves. And by October, we had this tight twenty-two minutes of text. 

Adelaide: Bring us to opening night.

Dove: I thought no one would come. I remember really thinking we’d perform to these empty ovals, right here where we are now. It was a bit dangerous to come into the park in groups then, or even to get past the checkpoints between encampments.

Fairfield-Malhotra: But we’d been putting the word out on the undergrounds for weeks, and people came! When night fell, slowly people started to emerge.

Dove: First, the nearby families, the growers, started to peek through the peas; and then more and more insides — that’s what we called the ones who kept paying rent — and then the street children. They all found us there in the park.

Adelaide: We think it was six or seven hundred people that night, right?

Fairfield-Malhotra: It was electric. Desi was cracking jokes like she’d known everyone forever. Adelaide was flitting about, saying hi, offering seeds. I was totally frozen. It’s not that I couldn’t believe it exactly, but it really hit me that we had actually made an invitation that was striking a chord.

Adelaide: Mia, could you say a little about what changed about how we wrote plays?

Fairfield-Malhotra: Early on as we started making more connections, we made a decision that each play would be written with a different neighborhood, knowing what we needed to say would be just for that audience, wherever we learned people were really despairing, and just for that moment—however many performances we could get away with before it got too risky—for us, but mostly for everyone in the crowd. By the time we made our ninth play, Leaves like a cross, in 2046, Christian nationalism really had a stranglehold, and we were hearing how intense the repression was in Bushwick. 

We would hang out in this little corner park off Myrtle and Knickerbocker and as students would get out of school, we’d pretend to be singing a hymn, but change a line to get their attention. A few kids would gather, and we’d ask them what it was like. How are your teachers? What happens if you act out? After a few weeks of this, we’d have the ingredients for something silly and meaningful, and we could work quickly. We’d say, hey, meet us back here next Sunday, bring your families with you after mass.

Dove: Honey, when I won the Tony, I never thought I’d play “Lucifer the Crucifer,” but there I was — this villain on stilts, covered in Brussels sprouts sown into a cape — and then the church bells rang, and hundreds of children came running, and they surrounded me. It was amazing. Sometimes, it almost felt like I was back in Jenin.

Fairfield-Malhotra: When we had introduced the characters and set up the challenge facing the community, we would ask everyone to huddle up and to dream up different possible ways forward. We sometimes spent hours playing out the groups’ visions of a different possible world.

We were seeing the youth of the borough learning collective participation in real time. Most youth of their generation had never planted anything. Anytime we would give a child a seed and tell them what it would grow into, it was like this new access to plants connected somehow to their wisdom of what else could grow, between them.

Adelaide: My heart is full! We really made something. Babes, I’m sorry — but you know aunty gets sleepy these days. The chill is starting to creep into my spine.

Dove: You are about to turn sixty, diva. Even mermaids age.

Adelaide: Can we do this again? There’s so much more to tell. But just in case — is there anything each of you would like to share? Ms. Dove?

Dove: Never forget the power of something the people can memorize. We need chants, we need song, we need poetry. When we have unity, we have power. And: pay attention to what sparkles in the eyes of a crowd of children. They can attack us; extract everything around us; but they can never silence those seeds.

Adelaide: Magic. Mia? 

Fairfield-Malhotra: Long live the theatre of the streets! In thirteen years of knowing each other, we made thirteen plays—and by my count, maybe seven hundred thousand people in Brooklyn have seen at least one of our four hundred performances. We learned from the cultural intifada of Palestine and communist playwriting in India and the possibilitarians of Vermont, and we brought those legacies to Sunset Park, and East New York, and Kensington, and Lefferts Gardens, and Canarsie, and Bed-Stuy, and Clinton Hill, and Bushwick, and Coney Island, and Bensonhurst, and Dumbo, and Flatbush, and here, to Prospect Farm. How about you, mama?

Adelaide: We had to move on. The most vibrant projects still come to an end. What’s to come is no less brutal — but I do think we’re about to experience something big. For now, it’s time for sleep.

Dove: You mean we can’t even stay for a minute? No one’s even gonna offer me a foot rub?

Fairfield-Malhotra: I got you, girl.

Adelaide: You can stay until I drift. I’m going to turn off the recorder.

Adelaide (she/they) is grateful for the incitement to speculate futures of joyous sisterhood and liberatory artistic practice for Project 2052, planted by life-giving experiences like the TransGenerational Theatre Project and the NYC Trans Oral History Project. She is a worker-owner of Milk Thistle Kitchen Cooperative, a non-hierarchical bakery, and is currently organizing with the Providence for Palestine coalition to divest city funds from genocide via a historic, binding ballot initiative. Coming soon: an audio recording of this story, on Radical Evolution + Bad Coolie Productions’ Performing the Revolution podcast (check out episodes featuring Jana Natya Manch and The Freedom Theatre!).