IS it possible to love someone whose views you hate?
That’s the question being asked by a powerful new drama based on the relationship between an award-winning US playwright and his brother, a convicted murderer and high-ranking member of a white supremacist prison gang.
An explosive exploration of race, power and cultural divides in the 21st century, Rift is to be given its UK premiere at the Traverse in Edinburgh during the Fringe.
It has already won critical acclaim from both audiences and critics in the US, but playwright Gabriel Jason Dean told the Sunday National he was a little nervous about showing Rift in Edinburgh this summer.
“The context has changed from when [Joe] Biden was president,” he said. “Then it was a little bit safer to be talking about these things. Now it feels like I’m holding a stick of dynamite. There has been political anxiety in the States my entire life to some degree, but things are really coming to a head.”
Rift certainly doesn’t stray from tackling political controversy and Dean said he was looking forward to seeing what the audience reaction would be like in Edinburgh.
“In the US if you say a play is political, that is a stroke against it for audiences, but in my experience, drama here is the opposite of that,” he said. “I’m excited to see how what feels a little more aggressive to an American audience will land in a place where political theatre is just the status quo.”
The play is based on Dean and his half-brother’s relationship and different trajectories in life.
Both were sexually abused by the same person but were brought up separately until Dean was a teenager. He lived with his father and mother and, despite the abuse, had a less traumatic upbringing than his brother, whose mother was in and out of incarceration. Eventually, their father took a paternity test and agreed to bring the boy into their home but by that time, much of the damage had been done.
In later life, it is the sexual abuse they both suffered that allowed them to connect despite their ideological differences.
“His was enduring because he lived with this person,” said Dean. “It happened to me one time but it doesn’t need to happen more than once to leave a mark on you.”
Talking to his brother, along with therapy, helped Dean come to terms with the sexual abuse and enabled him to write about it.
However, while that is part of the play, it is not the centre of it as Dean still has difficulties with his brother’s ideology even though it appears to have mellowed slightly during his incarceration.
Now 46, he was jailed for life without parole when he was 21, after being involved in a murder.
In prison, he joined a white supremacist gang, possibly as a survival tactic, but then became more and more extreme in his beliefs. It was more than Dean could take and he stopped contact with his brother for 10 years, only resuming it a year or so after Donald Trump was elected President of the US in 2016.
“I started thinking I needed to talk to my brother,” said Dean. “I couldn’t explain it at the time, I just felt this need to reach out to him.
“I had no intention of writing anything – I just felt that if the outside world was starting to look like the inside, then he needed something else in his life.”
Dean admitted “a bit of a saviour complex” may have motivated him but it swiftly became more than that.
“Being so close to extremism with him made me start to understand the ways in which the tentacles of white supremacy had weaved their way into my life too,” said Dean. “I’m still trying to unweave that tangled web in my own life and hopefully my children’s lives too.”
Although he thinks it’s misguided, he understands why people would vote for Trump.
“I think the answer that they’re seeking with him is wrong but I think what they’re seeking isn’t,” he explained. “They want to have enough, and be able to live the life that has been promised.”
Dean added: “The play really gets into this idea that it’s actually the lie of whiteness that’s killing us all. It’s killing folks of colour yes and it’s also killing poor white people.”
He believes the political situation could turn around in the US if there were a truly progressive presidential candidate that would appeal to those who voted for Trump.
“Essentially we have two conservative parties,” Dean said. “We desperately need a legitimate third party in the US. And to take big money out of politics.”
Although the circumstances of Dean and his brother’s lives are unique, he believes the conflict of ideologies is souring many relationships all over the US and elsewhere.
“At first I was full of self-doubt about the play, thinking nobody would understand it or want to see it but the opposite has been true,” he said.
Rift has resonance in Scotland too, with the rise of Reform and topics like climate change and gender recognition continuing to split society.
Yet while Dean finds many of his brother’s views abhorrent he can still find qualities in him he loves and admires.
“He’s a charming individual which is both his strength and his Achilles’ heel,” said Dean. “He is so loving but he’s not been exposed to the best people a lot of times and they’ve taken advantage of that.”
His brother’s giving nature was exemplified when Dean said he was considering writing about their relationship.
“I felt like I had to absolutely have his permission, no matter how much I fictionalised it and without hesitation he agreed. That demonstrates the way that he moves through the world, and especially in relation to me. He’s always put me on this sort of pedestal.”
Dean recognises that even if he and his brother had grown up together in a stable environment they would still be very different people, but writing the play has helped their relationship.
“We talk on a weekly basis now and, you know, he kind of filled a hole,” he said. “I think I filled a gap for him too, and now we have some kind of family, the two of us.
“I think it’s shown me I have a capacity for love I didn’t know I had. And if there is anything I’d like an audience to take away, it’s that if you have that rift in your life, whatever it is, it is possible to mend it.”
Rift opens at the Traverse Theatre on Thursday, July 31
