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