In the fall of 2011, I co-founded a project in reaction to what I saw as our "crumbling civic infrastructure." The Theater of Public Policy's mission is to use conversations and theater to introduce audiences to ideas and debates they might not have otherwise tuned into — and to equip them with enough information on those topics that they can make some decisions on how they feel about them.
On Nov. 19, that crumbling civic infrastructure caught up with us. As the Star Tribune detailed ("Pipeline protests spill into theater" Nov. 21), our show at the Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis was cut short when a group of protesters heckled and shouted us off stage.
The show was intended to be a conversation and audience Q&A with two members of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. If you are wondering what the PUC is or how a show about a relatively obscure regulatory agency could be so controversial, you are far from alone.
We originally booked two guests from the PUC because it is largely unknown and its processes can seem opaque. We wanted to shed light on this poorly understood agency.
What we didn't know when we booked our guests was that the PUC would be leading newscasts on the day of our show for its vote that morning reaffirming support for a new oil pipeline called Line 3.
The pipeline is controversial. It would be a major investment in fossil-fuel infrastructure at a critical moment for the world's climate. And it would cut across multiple Native American tribes' treaty land.
Unfortunately, we never got to discuss any of those issues. The group protesting our event shouted down our guests and even my questions of them. Had we been able to continue the program, I would have asked the commissioners about Line 3, climate change and how their vote earlier that day could be reconciled with treaty rights. We would have also opened it up for members of the audience to ask questions and challenge the commissioners themselves (as we do in all of our shows).
Those opportunities for an audience to learn about the PUC, Line 3 and whether allowing that pipeline was a terrible decision or not were closed off by the actions of a few. This was particularly frustrating for large parts of our audience, many of whom told me in calls and e-mails after the abbreviated event that they were against the new pipeline but had wanted the chance to learn more about the PUC and how they might engage with it going forward on precisely these kinds of issues.
