THERE’S
A CITY IN MY MIND

A theatrical response to the tragic events of The Siege of Waco, offering a vast array of voices ranging over a hundred years of Branch Davidian history from prophets to poets to pregnant teenagers.

Cast Breakdown

15 women, 6 men

Setting

Texas, 1993

Running time

2 hours, 30 minutes

A theatrical response to the tragic events of The Siege of Waco, offering a vast array of voices ranging over a hundred years of Branch Davidian history from prophets to poets to pregnant teenagers.

SYNOPSIS
PLAYWRIGHT'S NOTE

On the rolling prairie of central Texas, an international community of believers prepares for the end of the world. There’s A City In My Mind is an exploration of the faith, fear and fantasy that fatally bound a people together in the face of public hostility and government contempt.

“On February 28, 1993, viewers across the globe glanced at their television sets, and were provoked or intrigued by the documentary footage that passed across their screens. In an attempt to arrest one man, Vernon Wayne Howell, aka David Koresh, federal law enforcement agents, dressed in combat gear, had assaulted a large wooden residence near Waco, Texas—scaling its walls, breaking its windows, throwing grenades inside. It was as if the agents had gone to war.

Equally startling, the inhabitants of the building, known as Mt. Carmel, had fired back. Videotape showed the federal raiders in a rout, loading their dead onto the hoods of civilian vehicles. Not only had a seeming war broken out in America, but the government appeared to have lost.

On April 19 – following a seven-week siege – Mt. Carmel rapidly burned to the ground, folding the lives of 76 men, women, and children into its flames. A comparable tragedy had never been played out, live and in living color, over global TV. The event was a national sensation …”

From The Ashes of Waco by Dick J Reavis, 1995

There’s a City in My Mind received its premiere in an American Theatre Arts production at the Rose Theatre, London in May 2011.

First staged in the year which marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and 150 years since the outbreak of the American Civil War; There’s A City In My Mind explores the hostility that can erupt between fundamentalist communities and their neighbours. It is not my first attempt to depict the struggle Bible Literalists face in a secular world. Or in this instance, perhaps it’s we who struggle most? How does one rationalize the mentality of a people who were willing to lay down their lives for a man most of us would readily identify as (at best) a charlatan, (at worst) a sociopath?

There’s a City In Mind contains a fair share of accurate information about David Koresh and the long and complex history of the so-called ‘Branch Davidians’, but I am not in the end interested in adding to the reams of internet pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and apportioning blame. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Mount Carmel was the compound of a cult, but rather the home of a church – one with an increasingly disturbing theology, but still a church – and the play is an attempt to understand how ‘ordinary citizens’ might find themselves in such a place, at such a time.

Vernon Howell (Koresh) is, if anything, less colourful than the female prophets that preceded him and ultimately I found their voices of more interest dramatically (his dogma was essentially a paraphrasing of their scriptural interpretations of the KJV after all.)

For what it’s worth, it is true that Koresh cited a newspaper article that reported a Russian space station’s periodic sighting of ‘angelic beings’ – confirming, as he saw it, his claim that at that very time angels were transporting Koresh himself back and forth to their heavenly galaxy …

”There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
Would you like to come along
You can help me sing the song
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
Talking HeadsRoad to Nowhere

”Li'l David was small but oh my,
He fought big Goliath
Who lay down and dieth
Li'l David was small but oh my …
De things dat yo' liable to read in de Bible
It ain't necessarily so ...
Ira GershwinPorgy and Bess

”It is very nice if you are poor and not humble ... to bring your enemies down to utter destruction, while you yourself rise up to grandeur. And nowhere does this happen so splendiferously than in Revelation.
D H LawrenceApocalypse