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Portraying a character born from the mind of a playwright is standard fare for theater. Portraying a flesh-and-blood person who lives in your community, acting students at Westminster College will tell you, raises the stakes beyond the theater stage.
"It makes it so much more important to be honest, and faithful," said Annie Brings, a 21-year-old junior studying theater performance at the liberal arts college in Salt Lake City.
And being faithful to the experience of someone who's been raped or physically abused could be the tallest of orders where theater is concerned. For the 19 student cast members of "Speaking Your Piece/Peace: A Mosaic of Survival," it's an arduous journey into the heart of theater darkness. It's also immensely rewarding in its challenges.
With dialogue taken directly from transcripts, written or otherwise, of Utah women and girls who've been sexually and physically assaulted, the work demands fidelity to both the texture of individual experience and difficult truths about crimes against women.
The difficulty of conveying it all to a theater audience is evident during rehearsal, where students accustomed to delivering polished lines from Shakespeare or Shaw must instead replicate the pauses, stammers and anguish of women whose deepest trusts were violated.
"It took me a long time to realize that even in good families, you have to put yourself first, because if you don't take care of you, nobody else can." Those words, spoken during a recent rehearsal by Ali Lente, a 22-year-old senior majoring in arts administration, come straight from the mouth of a woman now recovering at YWCA's Salt Lake City shelter after suffering an attack by a member of her own family.
Jared Larkin, assistant professor of acting at Westminster and director of the work, gained access to victims' stories, with their permission, through Salt Lake City's Rape Recovery Center and YWCA. Even when "Speaking Your Piece/Peace" takes liberties with form, as in its central dance number depicting the near beating of a woman, the content never veers from reality. Its every move is lifted from police report descriptions.
The Westminster College production is one of a growing number of theater works known as "verbatim theatre." Taking its characters and scenes from news reports, and with actors who immerse themselves in the subject matter sometimes for months before rehearsals begin, the genre has been praised for stretching theater beyond the playwright's imagination into the grit of everyday experience. Anna Deavere Smith is widely recognized as having invented the genre with her works "Fires in the Mirror," a 1991 play about tensions between Jews and blacks in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," a 1994 work about the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. Both were constructed from interviews Smith held with people who lived through both events.
"Verbatim theatre," also called documentary theater, made inroads into Utah with Logan's Fusion Theatre Project, founded by Utah State University instructor and playwright Shawn Fisher. The project's 2010 play "Do Not Hit Golf Balls into Mexico" was built on interviews and research conducted the previous year, when students traveled to a border town to learn about immigration issues from residents to incorporate Mexican and U.S. perspectives.
Larkin said that, to the best of his knowledge, "Speaking Your Piece/Peace" represents Utah's first documentary theater project with interviews from Utah residents at its center. At the very least, it's the first of its kind performed by a student cast.
"There's not one moment in the show that doesn't come from someone else," Larkin said. "The gravity of representing another human being on stage is setting in. Part of the difficulty of these pieces was that there was so much material we could have chosen from."
According to the Utah Department of Health, one in three Utah women will at some point in their lives experience sexual violence. Add physical abuse cases to that statistic, and the number of Utah women subjected to violence climbs.
"The consensus of our program staff was that this was a great opportunity for these women to tell their stories," said MJ Gregoire, chief operating officer at YWCA Salt Lake City, who arranged for some of Larkin's students to meet women at the YWCA's shelter. "The power of a show like this is that people who don't hear stories first-hand have a chance to hear it up close. That's very powerful."
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"Speaking Your Piece/Peace: A Mosaic of Survival"
When • May 29 and 31, 8 p.m.
Where • Dumke Student Theater inside the Jewett Center at Westminster College, 1840 S. 1300 East, Salt Lake City.
Info • $5. All proceeds benefit the YWCA and Rape Crisis Center. Call 801-832-2457 or visit http://www.westminstercollege.edu for more information.