Visiting Artists Porte Parole bring documentary theater to Ohio State

Polarization has become an increasingly pressing issue over the past several years, and it’s a problem that Ohio State’s first Visiting Artist of the year, Porte Parole, want to address head on.  

Playwright and producer Annabel Soutar and director, actor and playwright Alex Ivanovici created Porte Parole with a mission to use theater to tackle divisive and relevant issues. The production company aims to equip audiences with the ability to have difficult, but necessary conversations to combat polarization and tribalism. 

During their visit to Ohio State, Soutar and Ivanovici hosted multiple conversations about their work and directed a public reading of their documentary theater production, The Assembly. The show features four people with extremely varied views on a topic as they have a conversation about climate change, fossil fuels and renewable alternatives. The play script uses the verbatim content from a recorded conversation of four individuals with very different ideological beliefs as they discuss their perspectives, and the show culminates in the group collaborating to write a letter whose contents they all support.  

“Sometimes in our day-to-day conversations there are topics that are off the table, but at Porte Parole and in documentary theater, the study of how we deal with conflict is how we frame our work,” said Ivanovici during a School of Environment and Natural Resources Spring 2026 Seminar series event. “To us, polarization is an indication of a conflict that can either be addressed or instrumentalized if we don’t engage with it.” 

Soutar and Ivanovici emphasized their hope that the work they do through Porte Parole has a lasting impact on the way that people with varying perspectives approach talking with each other. 

“In many ways, all of the theater we’ve created over the past 25 years was made to be an antidote to polarization, and to create space in the theater where people with diverse points of view can come in and speak to each other respectfully,” Soutar stated during the seminar. 

The Assembly was presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts and featured two actors from Ohio State and two performers affiliated with the Pomerene Center for the Performing Arts in Coshocton, Ohio.  

“I hope the show gave the audience the tools to start understanding how to have good conversations about divisive topics. Hopefully the audience leaves with a little bit more forethought about holding conversations with the people around them whom they don’t necessarily agree with,” said Paitton Lewis, an Ohio State lecturer who played the role of Kaella-Marie in the production. “It’s important for people to say things out loud so that we can check their behavior and our own behavior, and I think the show was a wonderful representation of how we can begin and continue to hear each other out.”  

During the public reading of The Assembly, the audience had an opportunity to act on the very philosophy of Porte Parole when Ivanovici invited audience members to come on stage and share their perspective on the issues the characters were discussing.  

“Documentary theater gives our audience a live opportunity to figure out what they think about a certain issue, which is an important feature that we value in our approach. We don’t show up with a roadmap to our answer, we show up with a diversity of perspectives that put the audience in the driver’s seat, so that by the end, they’ve experienced enough and are invited to create their own assessment and continue the journey of figuring out what they think. We don’t deposit them on Answer Island, we just show them that there’s a river flowing and they can decide which way they want to paddle,” Ivanovici explained.