The only thing more dangerous than outright censorship is convincing people the truth doesn’t matter.

That’s the heart of “The Mirror,” Sam Holcroft’s immersive and explosive play that opened its run at Portland’s Third Rail Repertory Theater on Friday, February 27, 2026.

It starts with a wedding, but the vibes are… off. Tuxedoed men greet you at the door handing out wedding programs where page two features an “Oath of Allegiance.” They follow you inside and mill around the audience, asking if you’re with the “bride or groom” and making the polite small talk required of strangers at weddings. An officiant waits at the front with his folio of speeches and documents ready to go.

After a few minutes, the music swells and you rise to your feet as the bride walks down the aisle, nervous excitement written across her face. She steps up onto the stage with her betrothed and the ceremony begins. The vows start smoothly, then slip into uncanny valley (did they just swear loyalty to each other and their nation?). Midway through, an audience member starts coughing, and keeps coughing. You ignore it, pushing back a little annoyance, trying to hear the vows, even as the coughing intensifies. That person jumps up and runs out of the theater — as she passes, you see she’s dressed in military garb — and suddenly the ceremony dissolves. Guards secure the doors, the wedding “couple” clears the space of matrimonial accoutrements, and the officiant thanks you for your courage in joining them for this play that has been in no way authorized by the Ministry of Culture. Then the “real” show begins.

This unauthorized meta-show follows Adem (Jonathan Thompson) as he’s called into a meeting with the Minister of Culture, Čelik (Leif Norby, a familiar face) to discuss the play script Adem has submitted for government approval. The script isn’ bad, Čelik reasons, it’s just… boring, and he wants to understand why Adem created these characters and these scenes. Adem explains to Čelik and Čelik’s military-sharpshooter-turned-assistant Mei (Kushi Beauchamp) that he didn’t create characters and scenes, per se. He wrote about his neighbors and their lives as observed through paper-thin walls.

Čelik lectures Adem that audiences don’t want to see reality reflected back to them when they go to the theater, or the movies, or the pages of a book. They want to escape and be transported to a different, better world with heroes, villains, and swashbuckling adventures with a satisfying emotional arc. Not something as yawn-inducing as reality. Čelik tells Adem his play isn’t approved to publish, but to try again and send him something that can inspire audiences, this time in alignment with the Ministry of Culture’s messaging and content requirements.

What follows are a series of meetings (read: confrontations) where Čelik coaxes Adem toward creating “palatable” art, enlisting the help of a nationally-recognized author, Bex (Joshua Weinstein) to shape Adem’s work toward Ministry guidelines. Meanwhile, Adem and Mei bond over the reality they experienced in the army that neither of them have been able or willing to forget.

“The Mirror” manages to jump through layers of stories and stories-within-stories like jump-rope, never losing the tension thanks to electric performances from every member of the cast and the heart-racing immersive threat of being an audience member in a world where unauthorized plays like this one are illegal and punishable.

*referee whistle* I’m calling time-out, because we’re at a bit of an impasse here. What follows becomes so convoluted within the jump-rope layers that explaining it succinctly is more or less impossible. There’s a twist that manages what only the great twists can: to shock the audience while making everything make sense. I’m not going to try and explain everything – I bet someone else on the internet has done that, somewhere, if you’re really curious. Instead, I’m going to talk about what I took from this show.

Censorship isn’t new, nor is it going away. In every corner of the world, for thousands of years, people in power have fought to suppress information and narratives that might threaten said power. So on one hand, the themes of “The Mirror” are timeless and location-agnostic.

On the other, they felt… pretty damn timely and local. Book bans, revised memorial plaques, selectively-revised history textbooks. The rapid emergence of generative AI that can blur the lines of reality based on a one-sentence prompt. Leadership that eschews reality in favor of the most convenient narrative painting their opponents as less-than-human, less-than-deserving-of-rights. The wide-scale deterioration of independent and local journalism. This all paved the way for a startling realization on the streetcar ride home: that if journalism represents truth, then PR represents the Ministry-of-Culture-approved plan to keep those in power, in power. Those with the dollars getting to set the narrative. Communicators, facing no other job prospects, compelled to join their ranks.

If this ends on a depressing note, that’s because it was. But it was exactly what it needed to be, and I’m so incredibly grateful for it. That’s why I immediately bought another ticket to see it again, which is becoming a habit of mine. (I was going to say “bad habit” but I’m not going to value-code it. And even if I was…. well, there are worse vices than an excessive affinity for local theater.)

It’s 2:40 a.m. and I should probably save this as a draft and reread it with fresh eyes before publishing. But instead, I’m going to hit post and let something imperfect and stream-of-consciousness and unpolished exist. Something that’s a little too honest and may not make much sense to anyone else. Because it’s real, and that matters.

(Also shoutout to Adelleda for stellar food and drinks, and the Portland public transit system for its network of buses across the city, and my sweet cuddly cat. What a perfect evening.) (If I write 26 more words, I’ll be at exactly 1,000, which seems fun. So here are more words in sequence to hit precisely one thousand. We did it!)