Actually by Anna Ziegler
Actually by Anna Ziegler
November 8-18, 2018
Lecture Hall 2.112
F. Loren Winship Building
300 E. 23rd St. Austin, TX 78712
Featuring Lauren Jacobs and Kriston Woodreaux
Actually Post-Show Discussion
November 18th, 3:30pm (after the 2pm show)
Title IX Education Collaboration with members of the University Compliance Services Team
From the UT University Compliance Services Team
Krista Anderson - Associate Vice President and Title IX Coordinator
Brelynn Thomas - Title IX Deputy and Education Coordinator
Breall Baccus - Title IX Advocate and Prevention Coordinator
Director Point-of-View:
Anna Ziegler pushes the audience into the deep end of our cultural struggles within our understanding of gender and race. She crafts a collision between the two which sets the trap for the audience to “pick a team” and then reveals the destructive fallacy of that impulse. As the third-party politics are piled onto Amber and Tom, denying them their humanity, the crushing pressure causes their pain to violently erupt, finally exposing their naked humanity to one another.
This play is not a political soapbox. Ziegler doesn’t just pay lip-service to the important issues of consent and the way our culture thrusts negative projections onto women and African-American men. The personal cost on these two are measured moment by moment. This play is an antidote to the way we process events in the internet age. Our social media and such has rigged a destructive form of dialogue around important issues which require a more sensitive, subtle, complex treatment to find progress and understanding. This progress requires a fuller, unguarded acknowledgment of the pain inside our fellow human beings. This takes practice. This play is a chance to practice this with a community.
The process of this play should push the audience into a crisis around their personal assumptions - a critical doubt. That critical doubt is the play trying to hack past the programmed firewalls in our minds that won’t allow for the complexities of each other’s humanity. Amber and Tom manage to glimpse the humanity in each other in their most raw and heated moment. Why isn’t our culture built around facilitating and deepening moments like that one? Instead we have been trained to dig into our tribal camp and feed on the surrounding controversy. Why is the impulse of our mob-mind to scrub others from the human roll call? What fears or demons are we denying within ourselves when we seek to pass judgment so thoroughly?