Satirizing the Left With Love: Inside Taylor Jon Gonzalez’s Chapter Meeting

How a chaotic political meeting inspired a biting yet affectionate comedy on Brooklyn activist culture.

Like most of us in the throes of pandemic anxiety, Taylor Jon Gonzalez’s brother entered 2021 feeling restless.

Locked in his home, he searched for community on a DSA Zoom link. At first, Gonzalez’s brother was heartened by the 90-some attendees loitering in the virtual gallery. Maybe there was hope, after all. But after 45 minutes of agendas and bulletin items, Gonzalez’s brother wasn’t so sure. When one attendee suggested “brain training”, an organizing strategy that involved bringing intelligent leftists from red states to New York, another attendee wondered if this could be construed as ableist.

The meeting descended into chaos. Gonzalez’s brother logged off the meeting.

This Zoom catastrophe became the inciting incident in Gonzalez’s play Chapter Meeting. The bottle production takes place over a fateful DSA chapter meeting/sleepover that quickly descends into madness against the flurry of a Williamsburg winter.

One character takes a slimy corporate job, one grapples with the allure of social media, another wrestles with her privilege. Pedantic, well-meaning hijinks ensue. 

Photos courtesy of the production

Gonzalez describes himself as “firmly within Brooklyn Activist culture,” though he’s not a card-carrying member of the DSA. Many of the characters take direct inspiration from people in his circle.

Dee, a sex-worker-adjacent social media star, is loosely based on a friend of a friend with a “robust Instagram presence,” as he describes it. Though he understands their fixation with keeping up appearances, he still finds it grating.

A Tampa native, Gonzalez had always dreamed of living in New York. Both his parents were local to Jamaica, Queens. Now, more than 13 years of living in the city, Gonzalez is all but immersed in the cutthroat world of Brooklyn community organizing. In Chapter Meeting, we feel the New York locale. His background in the New York improv scene only bolsters the atmospheric tension of liberal infighting. From Williamsburg hipsters to know-it-all NYU grads, the play is as much a riff on transplant culture as it is a commentary on infightiing in liberal political bodies. 

Gonzalez began writing Chapter Meeting in the winter of 2025.

“You have to remember,” Gonzalez explains, “This was the Adams era. I won’t say things are totally different, but the vibe is a little better now. This play is almost a fun tribute to looking back on how far we’ve come.” 

It seemed like the perfect time for Chapter Meeting. Zohran Mamdani’s New York is thriving. The DSA has never been more relevant. Gonzalez is eager to boost the conversation. He explains the subtitle: “A Socialist Play for the People” is meant to provoke the audience.

“I've had a number of people who are anti-DSA watch the play and then tell me afterwards, I love this play,” says Gonzalez. “Finally someone really put the DSA in their place. I was like, my brother, I'm glad you enjoyed the play, I just wish you would read the playbill a little bit.”

Though Chapter Meeting is a biting satire at the fraught social fabric of a liberal organizing body, Gonzalez insists it’s all love. He believes taking a step back, examining the ways we engage with one another, and occasionally have a laugh at the absurdity of it all, is an essential part of the movement. 

“My mother always told me, you only tease the ones you love.”