Playback Theatre Turns Towards Social Issues

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Cast of Playback Theater’s “Let’s Talk About Race.” Seated: Mountaine Mort Jonas, Ike Sloan. Standing: Brian Jaudon, Kim Christman, Linda Metzner, Deborah Scott, Raphael Peter, Emily Lower, Daniel Barber, Jessica Chilton, Michael Beveridge, and Joy Hodges.

What does improvisational theatre have to do with social concerns?

Not much, if your idea of improv is “Whose Line is it Anyway?” But improv can be an opportunity to see real life stories made into moments of theatre — and those stories can be the stories of the struggle to create new thinking, new worlds and new understanding. This is what playback theatre is all about.


All over the world,
playback groups are performing a unique kind of improv, based on
honoring personal stories. Many playback companies choose to use their
talents to educate, to mediate, or to bring people who have been
antagonists into dialogue. Some examples of this include a company in
Northern Ireland that works with Catholic and Protestant youth; a group
in India that performs stories across the historical divides of caste
and class; several New Zealand companies that train Maori as well as
white actors to portray the difficult stories of racism and
colonialism; and German companies that invite all their citizens
affected by World War II to finally tell the stories they have kept
silent for generations.


Asheville Playback Theatre, the local playback company, is joining in
this movement to bring social issues into the theatre. We are offering
a Community Concerns series this season. We are inviting audiences who
are interested in hearing and telling stories about topics that affect
our life here in this part of our world. A few months ago the topic was
“Let’s Talk About Race and Privilege.” We hoped the show could begin a
dialogue about some of the ways race and privilege have shaped our
thinking, and has both divided and brought people together.


Asheville Playback Theatre (APT) is currently an all-white company. In
preparation for this show, actors were extremely concerned about taking
on a topic of this enormity. We spent time rehearsing (as we always do)
with our own stories, stories about our experiences of our race and the
ways we do and do not have privilege in our lives. We found we have
plenty of feelings about this issue, and channeled that into our
acting.


We spent time reading articles and asking questions of our friends and
neighbors. We invited people to a rehearsal, people whose color or
ethnicity was different from ours, and listened to them, and practiced
our craft with their input. Several of us attended the Building Bridges
class. We were guests at a public housing development, and introduced a
multi-generational group to playback as a tool to look at their
community as it is now, and as they would like it to be. We reminded
ourselves that as playback actors, our intention is to listen deeply to
what we hear, attempting to remove our personal filters, and then use
our creative tools to reflect back the teller’s experience. The goal is
always to honor our story teller, whoever that person is. Sometimes we
fall short of truly capturing what is important to the teller, and then
we all learn from this, too.


Playback is not only about skillful acting, beautiful music and a
breathless moment of theatre. It does happen, and when it does, it is
captivating. But playback is also about bearing witness to the person
who is courageous enough to speak their truth on a topic that holds
deep meaning. It is about a theatre filled with people who do not know
each other, who come together to learn something new about their
neighbors and themselves. It is about willingness to listen beyond what
you know, and be touched by another person. And then it is about the
sense that My story is actually Our story, and we are more the same
than we are different.


APT welcomes any and all to come and continue this dialogue on Race and Privilege.

We have a lot to talk about.


This performance is endorsed by Building Bridges who offers ongoing
opportunities by “Going beyond Racism through Understanding and
Respect.”