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BAREFOOTNOTES: Hoi Polloi's WINNING IS WINNING at JILL@JACK and Summer Constitutional Contemplations
By Tom Phillips
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Published on September 23, 2025
Hoi Polloi's WINNING IS WINNING. Photo: Al Foote III
WINNING IS WINNING
Hoi Polloi
Presented in association with ¡Oye! Group
Conceived and Directed by Alec Duffy
Choreography by Dan Safer
JILL@JACK, Brooklyn
July 9, 2025
“The medium is the message” was the message of this midsummer musing.
Hoi Polloi's versatile cast of about 25 actors, dancers and singers performed a script taken entirely from the internet since the 2024 election. It’s a catalog of solutions for the nation’s ills — and not a winner among them. Every plea, no matter how eloquent, is cancelled out by its opposite, or rendered absurd by the very nature of the medium. Calls for community sound from the far left to the far right — on a medium which mocks the very notion of community.
More desperate solutions are urged. Everyone must have an escape plan, to leave the country, with a cover story known only to one’s most trusted accomplices. On the other hand, sex can take your mind off politics. A TV Party would break the tension. Self-immolation is sometimes an effective form of protest, according to one snippet likely generated by A.I. The immolation option is read by a talented actress, Kristen Hoffman, on the edge of hysteria. At another point Hoffman stands and screams, about 20 times, at various pitches and timbres but never a decrease in volume. By contrast, Amy Laird Webb retains a saintly calm as she preaches in a monotone the necessity of armed struggle..
The show ends with a staged raid by actors impersonating thugs impersonating ICE agents. They haul one of the actors off, and the rest ask the same question that began the show — how does this end? Exit all in silence.
Hoi Polloi didn’t offer much hope for the Resistance, but I found some on an uptown stage — in the Broadway musical Hamilton. It’s about the ill-fated man most responsible for the structure of the US government. Late in Act Two, the character of Thomas Jefferson says he found Alexander Hamilton’s banking system impossible to break — and believe me, he says, I tried.
The US Constitution — crafted mainly by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay in their Federalist Papers — is likewise designed to be unbreakable. It’s the world’s longest-running constitution, part of what “made America great.” Donald J. Trump wants to break it, but he doesn’t dare to attack it directly. So he ignores it, or tries to “disappear” it.
On August 6, reporters discovered that parts of Article One were missing from the Constitution at Congress’s website — including the right to habeas corpus, and the ban on the president taking gifts from foreign rulers. The story went viral — readers freaked out — and the missing sections were quickly restored.
So one way to resist is by reading the Constitution, quoting the Constitution, insisting on the Constitution— singing the Constitution. Resistance lives in song.
Every Saturday outside the locked gates of Columbia University — Hamilton’s alma mater — a small but mighty group of New Yorkers performs an oratorio with three notes and three lyrics:
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.”
"The President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
“No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Over these sung quotes from the Constitution, actress Kathryn Graybill speaks a script that changes from week to week — a catalog of the adminstration’s lawbreaking, a list of people detained without due process, or the names of famous Columbia folk who have defended freedom of speech. This is an unmediated protest, nothing between us and the passing crowd. Some join us and sing.
Nine months into the Trump presidency, the courts and the arts may be the last obstacles to a military-backed dictatorship in America. The Constitution is written in stone, impossible to evade. The arts are continuously moving and changing, impossible to squelch. And so we sing…
