Two years into the pandemic, playwright Lisa Sipos’ parents embarked on a cruise. Two days out of port, they tested positive for Covid and spent the next ten days confined to their cabin.

That incident finds its way into Sipos’ It’s All Overboard, a comedy sailing under the flag of Broom Street Theater that embarks for a three-week cruise beginning Friday. It’s Broom Street’s entry in the inaugural World Premiere Wisconsin festival.

As It’s All Overboard begins, a mismatched crew of passengers is gathering in Florida for a Caribbean cruise.

The conservative, recently widowed Teddy is there with his liberal daughter Ash, initially seen by other passengers as the youthful embodiment of Teddy’s midlife crisis.

The attractive and aptly-named Barbie does play such a role in the life of the older and wealthier Roger, one of many people on this trip who’s harboring a secret.

That would include Donna and Pete, professional cruisers whose initial interests seem to extend no further than selfies, Elvis, and social media.

And then there’s Claire, liberal and recently divorced, whom Sipos describes in her script as “progressive and a little hippy.”

Claire loves yoga and advocates for world peace; Teddy occasionally sports an NRA hat, thinks tacos are “ethnic” and resents having to show a vax card.

This is a comedy: Of course Claire and Teddy fall for each other, before realizing just how different their politics are. Once that cat’s out of the bag, the fur begins to fly.

Opposites Attract

“When I began working on this play, I set myself the challenge of writing a show in which the main character, Teddy, is on the other side of where my own politics fall,” Sipos said to me during a phone interview.

Raised Mormon but now a self-described liberal who’s no longer involved with organized religion, Sipos has first-hand experience with what it’s like to love people who don’t share her politics or world view; they’re well represented within the family in which she was raised.

“Some families seem to be able to come together for holidays like Thanksgiving and put politics to the side,” Sipos said. “In my family, coming together means explosions. I’ve recognized that we’d get farther, in my family and the world, if we’d focus less on proving that I’m right and you’re wrong.”

“I know and love so many people, many of them in my family, who think differently than I do,” Sipos continued. “My play is drawn from and stands in relation to people in my life who, despite my knowing what they believe in ways that are different from what I believe, are important to me.”

Maybe, Sipos thought, two such people – someone who leans Republican like Teddy and someone who leans Democrat like Claire – could find middle ground, of the sort that’s disappearing from American life. Maybe two such people could learn to see past their differences and discover what they share. Maybe, just maybe, they could even fall in love.

Judging a Book By its Cover

But as Shakespeare reminded us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the course of true love never did run smooth; as is true of the frequently mismatched lovers in the Bard’s play, characters in It’s All Overboard are continually jumping to wrong conclusions because of appearances.

“When I see someone wearing a camo hat or sporting a peace sign, I think I know who they are,” Sipos admitted. “But do I?”

Characters in Sipos’ play repeatedly misread cues like these; as they ruefully pull up, they recognize that they’ve been “judging a book by it’s cover,” as one says. “Perhaps I judged the situation too quickly,” says a second. “I was so blind,” confesses a third.

Such epiphanies – and an accompanying willingness to admit that one is wrong – steer Sipos’ vessel toward comedy, while freeing her to write rounder, more textured characters.

“When I write, I try to put myself in the mindset of my characters,” Sipos said. “I want more than the flat and broad characters you sometimes get in comedy; I want to do more than make an audience laugh. We all long for people we can relate to, in what we watch on stage and in how we live our lives.”

Easier said than done; journeying into such uncharted waters requires more patience and tolerance than many of us currently seem to have. It also requires letting go of the many assumptions and snap judgments that weigh us down. But throwing such baggage overboard doesn’t just lighten our load. It makes for smoother sailing.

“My title captures what I’m trying to say,” Sipos said, while noting that her title also reflects how we tend to go “overboard” during heated political conversations.

A Different Kind of Politics

In its promotional flyer for It’s All Overboard, Broom Street is billing the play as “a romantic (political) comedy,” which feels exactly right: while the romance takes precedence and the politics have been bracketed by parenthesis, one can never entirely escape the political, even in a play that sets its course toward romance.

“My show talks about the concept of politics and how it affects our how lives,” Sipos said to me. “It seems more political than it is.”

Does it?

Or have we settled for an overly cramped understanding of politics in our fractious lives as what happens in a public realm we increasingly try to avoid, done in by what E.M. Forster once aptly described as the “telegrams and anger” that count for everything there?

Might we not, as Forster himself did throughout his life, instead choose a more expansive definition of politics? One in which our cultivation of alternative pluralisms – in how we think and who we love, where we go and how we live – might be the most politically radical act imaginable?

What if, to riff on the Broom Street poster for Sipos’ play, we came to see love itself as a political gesture?

As our interview drew toward a close, Sipos mentioned a brother whose political view of the world on issues like abortion is light years removed from her own; when they tangle on politics, she can find him “infuriating.”

But Sipos also noted the “care and compassion” her brother exhibits toward their infirm, 96-year-old grandmother, who now lives with him. “I couldn’t do what he is doing,” Sipos said. “His care demonstrates a strength I don’t have.”

She paused, before continuing.

“I want people to see me in the ways that I am trying to see my brother,” she said. “All of us need to try and put ourselves in others’ shoes and listen.”

What a cruise that could be.

It’s All Overboard opens this Friday, April 14, and runs through May 6. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/its-all-overboard-2/.