CALGARY -- You might think a drama that presents itself as a 'he said, she said' exploration of campus sexual assault would be pretty clear about its heroes and villains.
That’s why 'Actually', a superbly-written (by Anna Ziegler), directed (by Jenna Rodgers) and performed (by Emma Houghton and Diego Stredel) one act, catches you a bit off-guard.
That’s because the villain of the piece is actually the Princeton University tribunal of academics and administrators who play judge and jury in the story of who did what when, one drunken night when two Princeton freshman had sex.
Amber (Houghton) is a child of academics, precocious and romantic and a bit lost in her head. Tom is African-American, bright and talented and cocky as well as a fish out of water walking across the quad of an Ivy League campus where all the future masters of the universe are students, too.
All Tom wants is make his mom -- the true love of his life -- proud and find his Ivy League muse, who turns out to be a southeast Asian violinist named Sunil who shares Tom’s passion for a certain Mozart concerto.
We meet Tom and Amber in the very first days of their Princeton journey, when everyone’s awkward, everyone overdrinks, no one studies -- and it all leads to the unfortunate incident that becomes the centre of Actually.
It’s all told through the dual narration of the two characters in duelling monologues, as they each relate the story of how they came together and how it all eventually blows up into an accusation of sexual misconduct.
Ziegler is a good storyteller, and she has a nice feel for her characters. They’re both smart and Amber is particularly funny in a nerd-girl way of someone whose literary life is a little more fulsome than her actually life, where she spends a lot of time feeling inferior to Heather, a bombshell who comes from money.
Houghton has a deft comic touch with Ziegler’s dialogue -- sometimes, I felt as if I just sat down in a coffee shop too close to the first-years.
Stredel’s Tom is a little more complicated, because he overcompensates for his lack of privilege with a cockiness that creeps up to the line, but never crosses it. He’s charming and likeable too, and when he tells stories about the piano teacher who took him under his wing, and Sunil and his violin, he breaks your heart.
The university tribunal is never seen, but they’re there -- and in case you don’t make the connection, Amber references Arthur Miller’s The Crucible early on, and The Crucible is exactly what an academic tribunal most resembles: a bunch of people with their own vested interest in shaping the narrative as much as a desire to find out what happened that night.
Rodgers, who has done some fine work running Chromatic Theatre as well as at the Banff Playwrights Colony, is a director with a strong point of view, and she isn’t shy about making audiences uncomfortable.
Mostly, she does that through the way she positions the actors onstage, the way she resists easy emotional blocking and instead allows the story do the talking, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.
Winner of the Ovation Award in Los Angeles for best new play, Actually is actually a terribly human story about what can go wrong when you mix teenagers, dormitories, free drinks, and careerist academic administrators determined to burn every witch they find hiding in freshman clothing.
Actually runs at Alberta Theatre Projects through Saturday night at the Martha Cohen Theatre at Arts Commons
