Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, an Irish husband-and-wife playwright team, view theater as a way to correct the record. For these conservative artists, their creative mission is to fight liberal orthodoxies with what they deem to be a dose of reality. Their first production, taking a revisionist look at the 2014 killing of Black teenager Michael Brown by a white Missouri police officer, earned national media coverage — and sharp criticism, including from some cast members who quit. 

McAleer and McElhinney don’t see their latest production as conservative, or political at all, though they fear it will still garner left-wing opprobrium. Titled “​​October 7: In Their Own Words,” the play offers an unvarnished look at the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas in Israel in 2023, told through the testimonies of Oct. 7 survivors. It premiered in New York in 2024 during a six-week run off-Broadway and will be performed at the Kennedy Center for one night this month, on Jan. 28. 

The playwrights view their show as a natural fit for the newly rebranded Kennedy Center, now called The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, under the leadership of President Donald Trump. 

“It’s supposed to be the cultural epicenter of America. This is the perfect place for it … the center of power, the center of influence, and a place that seems to need the truth more than ever,” McAleer told Jewish Insider in an interview in December.

Since Trump took over the institution early in 2025, the Kennedy Center has faced protests and boycotts from some liberal critics. After the renaming in December, musician Chuck Redd abruptly canceled his annual Christmas Eve jazz concert in protest, earning threats of a lawsuit from Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell. “Wicked”composer Stephen Schwartz has since pulled out of a scheduled appearance at a May gala, along with a dance company, a string quartet, a jazz trumpeter and a folk performer. On Friday, the Washington National Opera said it would no longer perform at the Kennedy Center, the most high-profile cancellation yet. 

Amid the Kennedy Center’s controversial overhaul this year, its new leaders have stood firm on a new branch of programming: shows and artwork focused on Israel and antisemitism. “October 7: In Their Own Words” is part of that effort, along with a visual art exhibit about the Hamas attacks that was displayed in the building in the fall. 

The production of their show is not a formal Kennedy Center offering; McAleer and McIlhenney’s production company rented out the stage their team will be using. But Kennedy Center officials view the play as intertwined with other programming offered by the arts center under the Trump administration. 

“This all figures into this effort at the Kennedy Center to combat antisemitism through the arts,” said Bonnie Glick, the Kennedy Center’s senior director of individual giving and corporate relations. “We are actively helping them to get the word out about what happened on Oct. 7 through eyewitness accounts.”

A journalist by training, McAleer previously worked as a reporter at the Financial Times and The Economist in Eastern Europe. He and McElhinney operate under the framework of what’s known as verbatim theater — productions modeled off real events, with the actors portraying real people and reciting, verbatim, their own words. 

“It’s the world the way it is, not the way we’d like it to be,” McAleer said. “So that, I think, is why we went to Israel after Oct. 7, was because we saw people weren’t telling the truth. Or we saw that people were immediately pivoting away from Oct. 7 and pivoting to Gaza.” 

Journalism is often described as the “first rough draft of history,” McAleer noted.

“We just felt that nobody was going to write this draft,” McAleer said. “They were all going to write the first draft of the Gaza war without mentioning Oct. 7.” 

There is still a degree of editorializing, of course. McAleer and McElhinney had to choose which survivors to include, and to cut down their parts from hours of interviews. But everything spoken on stage in the production came from real conversations.

“Every word on stage was said by someone in our interviews,” McAleer said. “I was very determined that it would be their voices.” 

Neither McAleer nor McElhinney had been to Israel prior to 2023. Soon after the Hamas attacks, they turned to Jewish friends in Los Angeles, where they now live, and began to ask around for people to talk to who had been affected by the attacks. 

Within weeks, they planned a trip to Israel, and spent three weeks there interviewing Oct. 7 survivors for hours each day. The play starts with each speaker describing how they spent the day before the attack. 

“It starts on Oct. 6, and that was very deliberate,” McAleer said. “They would be at peace now, still, if it wasn’t for Oct. 7.” 

When the pair initially cast the show, they said some people opted not to audition for parts because they worried that being in a play so closely connected to Israel might damage their career. The theater community is a “very intolerant bunch,” McAleer noted.

“But then there were people who said, ‘I have to be in this play.’ That was unusual,” McAleer added. “For the first time ever, I saw an audition tape where they would say, ‘Just before I do the audition, I just want to say, this is the most important play I’ve ever auditioned for.’ They broke the rules of auditioning to address us.” 

Since the initial run in New York, the play has been performed a handful of times on college campuses. The producers, along with the Kennedy Center, hope that it will serve as an educational tool for people in the area.

“It’s designed and timed to be when Congress is back in session, when schools and universities are back in session,” Glick said. “Their goal is to have this be something that sparks dialogue in a cordial manner, and that brings continued visibility to what happened on Oct. 7 through eyewitness accounts.” 

For McAleer, the purpose of the show is straightforward. “All I wanted,” he said, “was to tell the truth.”