Theatergoers filed into the Cahn Auditorium at Northwestern University on Tuesday to see a play comprised of testimonies from those impacted by the 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel. As the attendees sat at the edge of their seats waiting to hear the fate of the people whose stories were told, a fire alarm went off, disrupting the evening.
Ann McElhinney, who co-wrote the play “OCTOBER 7” with her husband, Phelim McAleer, told Fox News Digital that many audience members initially remained seated, believing the alarms were part of the show.
“Initially, they thought it was part of the play because they heard these sirens going off, and the dialogue prior to that had been about sirens going off, rockets going off, the red alarm going off,” McElhinney explained to Fox News Digital. “They were like ‘Oh, this is part of the play,’ until they realized it wasn’t.”
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After the theater had been evacuated and cleared by authorities, many people left, according to McElhinney, who told Fox News Digital that she believed that people were scared by the incident. However, she said others who chose to stay, feeling “defiant” and refusing “to be terrified by this.”
McAleer noted that the performance ended with a standing ovation, which he believed was both a tribute to those who worked on the show and those who returned after the alarm went off.
“The standing ovation was for the actors, the standing ovation was for the director, the standing ovation was for the stories. But it’s also, I think people were giving themselves a standing ovation that someone had tried to intimidate them, that someone had tried to say to them, ‘You’re not going to tell the truth. We don’t want to hear the truth, we want to shut you up, we want to shut down, we want to frighten you and intimidate you.’ And they didn’t succeed,” McAleer told Fox News Digital.
In response to Fox News Digital’s request for comment, Northwestern Media Relations said in a statement, “At approximately 8:12 p.m., a fire alarm at Cahn Auditorium was activated, which caused the evacuation of the building. Upon a fire and police investigation, the building was determined safe, and guests invited back in. The event continued as planned and concluded at 9:45 p.m. The Northwestern University Police Department will continue their investigation.”
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While the play was disrupted, McAleer and McElhinney said there were no protesters outside the venue at the start of the show. McAleer told Fox News Digital that while “people are perfectly entitled to protest outside the venue,” what happened inside the theater was “more insidious.”
The couple said they believe someone deliberately activated the fire alarm after sitting through much of the performance.
“This was someone, we believe, someone sat through the play and then came out at the most emotional time,” McAleer told Fox News Digital.
“It’s something very insidious that someone decided to disrupt this rather than even, by the way, have a protest, make their voice heard. But no, they decided they didn’t want their — they did the sneaky, cowardly, insidious, nasty thing of setting off a fire alarm, causing huge fear and just absolute nervousness among the people who were there and caused this trauma on the anniversary of October 7,” McAleer added.
McAleer pointed out that while it was still Oct. 6 in Chicago where the play was held, it was already Oct. 7 in Israel when the fire alarm was activated.
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The spoken-word play is a collection of testimonies that McAleer and McElhinney compiled when they went to Israel shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks. McElhinney told Fox News Digital that the couple had been in Ireland as the attacks took place and were stunned to find that people were criticizing Israel’s response the following day, seemingly overlooking the attacks themselves.
“We realized that if we didn’t go and tell the story and do this work that, you know, it looks very much like nobody else was going to do that,” McElhinney told Fox News Digital.
McAleer echoed a similar sentiment, saying that shortly after the attacks, they noticed that “everyone from journalists from the establishment, from university campuses — they all wanted to talk about the war in Gaza, but nobody wanted to talk about October 7th.”
“Journalism is supposed to be the first rough draft of history. Nobody was writing that draft,” he added.
The couple traveled to Israel — a place neither had visited before — rented a car and began trying to contact people willing to share their stories. McElhinney recalled that their hotel in Tel Aviv had a makeshift memorial for an employee who had been killed at the Nova music festival.
McAleer and McElhinney ultimately interviewed approximately 20 people, with testimony from 15 included in the play.
In addition to Northwestern University, the play, titled “OCTOBER 7,” has been performed in New York City, Princeton, UCLA, Bowdoin College and the Kennedy Center. While the incident at Northwestern was noteworthy, it was not the first time the couple had to deal with security for their production.
McElhinney explained that during the play’s New York City run, the production had a daily NYPD presence. She said she believed it was the only New York play in living memory to require police protection every day.
“That tells you something about free speech in New York City,” McElhinney said. She pointed out that the play, which focuses on the experiences of Israelis, including Jewish survivors of the attacks, needed security while being performed in a city with a large Jewish population.
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Ultimately, McAleer said the incident at Northwestern revealed something about the state of American college campuses.
“American campuses are deeply strange, dangerous places at the moment for a Jewish person,” he said. “You mean, you can’t mourn your dead. You can’t mark your anniversaries. You can’t walk the campus without fear of being attacked or having your event disrupted.”
“You know you can have an event without massive and expensive security,” McAleer added. “What does that say about the campus idea of freedom and free speech and free thought? Free thought is dead on American campus[es]. Free speech seems to be dead on the American campuses.”
McAleer told Fox News Digital that the couple planned to file a police report about the incident and that “we hope that whoever did this feels a full force of the law because this cannot be allowed to stand.”
