When you go to a play, you expect to see one story play out. Opening night, closing night, any days in between, you expect the story to be the same. The ending will always be the ending.
This is not the case with “Safe Harbor,” an original play by Dominic Dominguez ’25. It is an interactive experience.
From the start, the audience finds themselves in a post-apocalyptic world, seeking shelter in a bunker for years after nuclear fallout. As the play opened, everyone in the audience became an active participant. We were encouraged to read the papers scattered around the floor as “privacy is a thing of the past” according to Hassan Khan ’27, who played the shelter bureaucrat.
From poetry to equations to a list of the top ten things about the apocalypse — a list that didn’t make it past the first four — the scattered papers gave an image of people struggling to survive, awaiting inevitable death.
Then, someone came into the bunker and invited us all to Safe Harbor, a place where we would be protected, as long as we followed the rules that were established by “Father,” the creator of Safe Harbor. Those who took the “Safe Harbor Missionary” up on the offer became an integral part of the story, making individual decisions that changed the course of the play.
Those that remained in the bunker died, becoming passive audience members. From there, the story took place in Safe Harbor.
At first, Safe Harbor seemed to be a welcoming place. There was a meditation ceremony meant to connect the active audience to one another. Each audience member was assigned a new name and job. On Wednesday night’s test show, I was a passive audience member, but on Thursday I became active, and I was given the name OW.
The names and jobs were listed on cards. These were given out by Father, played by an animated Gabriel Higbee ’26. One of the highlights of the show was the accent Higbee gave the character: classic southern gentry tones, something out of a Civil War era film — more of a drawl, less of a twang. It added a layer of entertainment and complexity to Father: It was as if the character himself, not the actor, were performing this accent.
Very quickly, it became apparent that Safe Harbor, and Father himself, were not as kind as they initially appeared. With violent rhetoric that demonized the people stuck in the wasteland — starving, desperate, and in pain — the audience was told that they couldn’t be let in. “Scabheads,” as the audience was called, would only disrupt the peace of Safe Harbor’s way of life. We couldn’t let them in for the good of the community, we were told. We had to do as we were told — marry who we were told, work the jobs we were told. Safe Harbor was not a place where you could step out of line.
We were then introduced to the rebellion, standing up to Father’s authoritarian control. The rebel leader quickly became my favorite character with her poem “Pleasing Daddy,” critiquing Father’s rules, restricting individuality or freedom of any kind for the sake of “the community.”
As an audience, we had a choice to make: Long live the revolution, or long live Safe Harbor.
Those that supported the revolution went up on stage to hear the rebel plans — to kill Father in his office the night before the Badge of Honor ceremony. As everyone left the meeting, Father caught them. He told them to give up rebel plans and be spared, or stay silent and be sent to the wasteland.
If no one gives up the plans, Father is murdered.
In the first show, no one gave up the plans. The rebellion won, and Safe Harbor was free. In the second show, however, someone stepped forward to tell Father that the rebels planned to kill him. Another person — me — also stepped forward to stand against the rebellion. Who can blame me? I wanted to see the other ending.
And with this decision, the rebellion was doomed.
Walking into the show, I didn’t know what to expect. But Dominguez, the cast, the crew, and the audience together paint a picture of authoritarianism: between “Scabheads” and those in Safe Harbor who didn’t always care about them, Father and the rebellion. A story where personal comfort could outweigh the right thing, with many people making that choice right in front of you.
Of course, it was just a play, and there were no real stakes to the story other than seeing how it ended. But art is political, and the message of Safe Harbor is impossible to miss: Long live the revolution!
Mackenzie Hollingsworth is a head editor for The Prospect. She is a member of the Class of 2026 and can be reached at mh5273@princeton.edu.
Please direct any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com
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