Review: This Is Not Not a Drill Makes Activists of Podcast Walkers

The most theatrical part of This Is Not Not a Drill, Daria Miyeko Marinelli’s audio walking tour-meets-political resistance training, is sauntering past thousands of other headphoned people milling through Chinatown and feeling a heightened curiosity about the spectrum of simultaneous soundtracks. While I listen to Marinelli narrate New York City’s participation in the Underground Railroad, the woman waiting for the same walk signal might be streaming the new Miley single, while the man next to her is could be enjoying Joe Rogan’s latest musings. Theater people love talking about how shared time and space breeds communal experience. Here, you’ve never been more aware of how toothless time and space can be when confronted with personalized audio technology.

Intentional or not, it helps make a case for the urgency Marinelli and director Dominique Rider bake into their interactive podcast walk, built for what they call “these five-alarm fire days.” Communal action doesn’t just happen. Pushy, contrary, unapologetic people make it happen. And Marinelli will prove it in a historical choose-your-own-adventure jaunt through lower Manhattan where you pick your route based on three categories: mutualism, non-compliance, and institutional capture.

My non-compliance journey began at David Ruggles’s house on Lispenard Street, where escaped slave Frederick Douglass took shelter in 1838. I continued on to the Odeon, a 1980s hub for renegade artists like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I proceeded to the New York Stock Exchange, where ACT UP held rallies to bring attention to the A.I.D.S. epidemic. If you get lucky with weather, it’s a lovely walk, not to mention a rare opportunity to be a tourist in your hometown.

But, as diligent listening and NYC street navigation compete for brain space, your mind might start to wander to the meta question, “Is this theater?” Maybe it is to the extent that any act of storytelling is. The answer, however, is largely irrelevant to the mission, which is to achieve that difficult alchemy of turning education into action.

Participants cap off the walking tour with the “resistance training” of one’s choice: The brave could dive straight into canvassing. I opted for a workshop on bystander intervention and anti-ICE training. The experience ends with a collective exit reading and an invitation to lounge in a literature-littered living room space. As immersive experiences go, it’s a bit rough and ready. But if it takes the auspices of theater to educate and activate, there are worse ways to bait and switch.