Storyline
Summary
Set over the course of Election Day 2024, Tribes USA unfolds inside the studio of a live political debate show hosted by charismatic media personality Jason Proctor. What begins as an energetic night of ideological combat between ten Americans representing sharply different political and cultural perspectives gradually spirals into something far more personal and dangerous.
As ratings soar, outrage becomes addictive, identities harden into emotional armor, and the line between performance and reality begins to collapse. Beneath the spectacle, however, unexpected relationships form and deeply buried wounds emerge — especially between Jason and Clara, his producer and fiancée, whose growing unease with the show’s escalating toxicity threatens both their relationship and the production itself.
Blending satire, contemporary musical theatre, psychological drama, and media critique, Tribes USA explores polarization, isolation, identity, and the fragile possibility of human connection in modern America.
ACT ONE
Scene 1 – Pre-Broadcast:
Election night, 2024. A television studio. Ten American voters — from the far left to the far right — are about to take ten color-coded chairs and argue on live national television.
Fifteen minutes to air, host Jason Proctor works the studio audience and lets them in on his own stakes. Behind the panel hangs a live viewer counter, reading zero. One million viewers by the end of the night renews his contract. Two million earns him a bonus. He gets married next week.
Clara — associate producer, and Jason’s fiancée — brings bad news. Panelist Four has pulled out. Without that chair the panel’s balance collapses and the two-million viewer goal is out of reach. Clara volunteers to take the seat herself; she has wanted to be on camera since she was eight. Jason resists, then relents. The first thing the show spends to make its numbers is the woman he is about to marry.
Scene 2 – Going Live
Song 1 - Turn It Up!
Jason opens the broadcast, lays out the tribes — Blue, Purple, Red — and promises to take the audience on the ‘ride of their lives’. The viewer counter starts at 85K and reaches 210K by the time he’s done.
Song 2 - Meet the Tribes
A rapid-fire patter number puts all ten panelists in front of us inside a single song. On the left: a recent graduate carrying a grief she has not set down, a women’s studies professor, and a DMV employee who would rather talk football. In the center: Clara, a software engineer, a resident physician, and a beat cop. On the right: a grandmother, a podcaster, and a young mechanic who cannot find a door that opens for him. Viewer counter climbs to 450K.
Jason initiates the first debate.
Song 3 - Go Tribal
The first debate is about partisanship itself. Red and Blue each take a verse arguing that the only way to save the country is to fight for it without apology. Clayton and Cristy answer from the center: past a certain point, tribalism stops winning battles and starts losing the country.
The show takes its first commercial break with the counter at 570K.
Song 4 -Falling into Place
Clara alone, in a pool of light. After a lifetime behind the camera, after every “next year” and every pitch that went nowhere, a million strangers are watching her. She is engaged to a man who was on every list she swore she would never date, and who turned out to be the home she did not know she was looking for.
Scene 3 — The Broadcast Resumes
Jason initiates four increasingly contentious debates to keep viewership climbing.
Song 5 - The Flow
Immigration, written as a three-part canon: the right sings to slow the flow, the left to speed it, the center to hold it steady. Three arguments in the same key at the same time — the score making the structural point before anyone says it out loud. Counter – 650K.
Song 6 - 22 Weeks
Abortion, carried largely by three women. Rachel sings of the granddaughter who exists because her daughter chose not to end a pregnancy, and of her exhaustion with the noise. Florence answers for bodily autonomy. Cristy, the physician, makes a clinical case for choice through twenty-two weeks. Frank presses for no exceptions at all.
Then, a surprising revelation on air. Lamar on the left and Rachel on the right are related. Lamar is married to Rachel’s daughter. Rachel’s most cherished granddaughters she calls her “caramel-colored angels” are Lamar’s little girls. Two people seated on opposite sides of the political divide turn out to share a close human connection. Counter – 870K.
Song 7 - Not Enough
LGBTQ rights. Frank carries it, and for him the argument is not abstract: his fourteen-year-old daughter has told him she is now his son, and he has not caught up. Florence answers from her politics and her own life. Clayton and Cristy hold the center, agreeing broadly with the left while raising the question of trans women in women’s sports without contempt. Counter – 930K.
Song 8 -Madness
Guns. Elaine anchors the room, rubbing the memorial bracelet of a high school friend shot dead six years ago tomorrow. The left names the slaughter. The right names the futility of legislating it. Craig, the cop, argues for both at once. By the end Elaine and Eric are shouting, and the counter crosses 1.1M.
The show takes its Second commercial break.
Jason and Clara celebrate clearing the million-viewer milestone, securing his job. He immediately sets his sights on two million.
Backstage, two small scenes do quiet damage. Eric asks Craig for a recommendation to the police academy, admitting he failed the psych evaluation last year — authoritarian profile, dehumanizing language, elevated risk for excessive force. Craig gently declines. Minutes later Eric, in an unguarded attempt at decency, tries to say something kind to Elaine about her slain friend. Still grieving, she dismisses him. He curses himself for trying.
Song 9 - No Apologies
Elaine and Eric, the show’s two extremes, sing in mirrored counterpoint from opposite ends of the stage about how their life experiences shaped their decision to define themselves without regard to expectations of others — the same refusal pointed in opposite directions. They close the distance, meet at center, and discover that pride pointed at each other is collision, not communion.
Act One curtain.
ACT TWO
Scene 1 – Broadcast Resumes
Frank and Florence have a cordial exchange. He invites her to his podcast. She considers it. Jason notices the exchange and remarks to Clara that he has to keep Florence and Frank at odds with one another for the rest of the show.
Song 10 - What's Wrong With You
Jason initiates a breakneck hip-hop trade on Trump, Harris, and the sanity of anyone who would vote for either — Florence and Elaine against Frank and Eric. Civility starts to go. Counter reaches – 1.3M. Jason reads the number as momentum. Clara reads it as a warning.
Jason initiates police reform debate.
Song 11 - Just Comply
Craig, the only officer on the panel, argues that the reform that would save the most lives is civilian compliance with lawful orders. The number plays as an earnest plea for civil order or an authoritarian demand for obedience, depending entirely on who is listening. Lamar and Elaine push back. The panel takes sides and the bickering does not stop. Counter – 1.4M. Jason — several refills into the flask behind his podium — lets it run, then wanders offstage to fetch a keyboard. Clara cannot believe what she is watching.
Song 12 - Tribal Truth
To discuss the issue of information bubbles, Jason turns piano-bar emcee. He invites each tribe to deliver its “good ol’ tribal truth” about the 2020 election, January 6th, and Joe Biden. It is the show’s broadest comedy and the exact moment its host stops refereeing and starts stoking. He kills the panel’s microphones and lets them argue unamplified for the crowd. Counter – 1.7M.
Show takes its third commercial break.
Song 13 - At What Cost?
Clara confronts Jason downstage and asks the question the rest of the night will answer: when you are chasing what little is left to gain, what are you giving up to get it?
Jason promises, halfheartedly, to lower the tension level on the set for the final segment of the show.
With the counter at 1.7M and the bonus just a hundred thousand viewers away, Jason throws caution to the wind and initiates a final fiery debate.
Song 14 - You're Gone
The final debate spirals. Florence and Elaine indict the right’s motives, Frank and Eric the left’s, and the exchange strips down to raw invective. Elaine slaps Eric. Eric pulls a concealed pistol and turns it on her. Clara jumps in front of Elaine. Craig fires. Eric’s falling shot finds Clara, and she dies in Jason’s arms as the counter freezes at 2.5 million — the bonus, paid in full.
Song 15 - At What Cost (Reprise)
Jason alone in a single light, the frozen viewership tally glowing in sad irony behind him, mournfully sings a fragment of his opening number back at us: “I’ll take you on the ride of your lives.”
Dark.
Scene 2 – The Aftermath.
Police tape across the stage. Several panelists find human connection as they absorb the gravity of the moment, standing next to where Clara and Eric lay dead earlier.
Florence and Frank find simpatico and she agrees to do his podcast.
Clayton and Cristy draw closer.
Elaine struggles to bear the increasing weight of accountability for her role in the shooting.
Rachel and Lamar find each other at center and hold on — then Lamar’s wife calls. The whole family was watching, and the girls want to talk to their nana. Rachel takes the phone, and her face changes.
The panelists leave the studio quietly, as people.
Scene 3 – The Benediction
The set is struck. The actors stand upstage in the order their characters sat.
Song 16 - Turn it Down
The opening number’s bookend and the show’s benediction. The actors come downstage in pairs — out of character, as themselves. The company asks the audience to turn down the static, the tension, the anger, and names what is left when it is gone: a common country, a common creed, a common wish to hand our children something better than this. If we have to be tribal, can we agree to be one tribe – Tribe USA.
End.