Meet Our 2008 DTRW Fellowship Winner:
Josh Roberts

Josh Roberts

We are thrilled to congratulate Josh Roberts on winning the 2008 Delay the Real World Fellowship!

Josh’s application immediately stood out as unique, intriguing, and timely. The obvious commitment to his project is most impressive and embodies the spirit of the book and is one full of adventure and artistic expression.

Starting in July, Josh plans to visit the most ideologically extreme places in the American political geography. In an effort to investigate the red state/blue state framework that seems to underpin our current political conversation, where he’ll spend a week in ten American counties: the four reddest, the four bluest, and for good measure two of the “purplest.”

Within these counties he’ll be interviewing anyone and everyone he can about politics, from Mayors to mill workers, game hunters to gay couples, truckers to treehuggers, and after an intense period of 10 weeks, he’ll use the transcripts and recordings from these interviews to write a play about the nature of American political dialogue and its relationship to the places we live.

Josh’s interviews will seek to discover what binds communities together in America’s most politically homogeneous places, how the people who reside in them see themselves within our political landscape, and how they feel about the connection between the places they live and the rest of the country.

He believes good listening is at the heart of acting, so he’ll be paying close attention to the way people speak, stutter, pause, swear, etc., because those moments where speaking patterns are broken, are the moments where true character is revealed.

In an age increasingly dominated by the excerpting and distillation of ideas—through sound bytes, video clips, talking points—Josh would like to find out what kind of conversation is possible when politics is presented with an artistic ear and voice, when theater is invented with a journalistic tilt, and most of all, when people are given enough space to speak with complexity, nuance, reflection, and uncertainty. What happens when we broach politics with depth rather than speed?

Josh will be traveling through counties in Idaho, Texas, Montana, DC, South Dakota, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, and New York to conduct his interviews.

After transcribing the interviews, he will workshop the script in rehearsals and staged readings with M.F.A. students at the American Conservatory Theater, where he’ll be delaying the real world further by entering grad school. He’ll be devoting 6 months to a year to assemble the play, and when completed he’ll begin finding it a home for a fully staged commercial production. A portion of the proceeds from the eventual production will benefit an organization focused on enriching voter participation.

Please join us in wishing Josh all the best as he embarks on his endeavor.

◊ Visit Josh’s “One State, Two State” Audio Blog