Theater: Well, Actually, I Thought

ACTUALLY ** out of ****

Perhaps someday a staging of a play about rape wont seem so ferociously timely. Perhaps. But this play would have been timely in 2016 when Trumps vile boasting about sexual assault was all over the airwaves. It would have been timely in 2015 when the acclaimed nonfiction book Missoula by Jon Krakauer shone a spotlight on how harassment, assault and rape on campus is under-reported and over-whelming school officials. It would have been timely in 2014 when Rolling Stone published a poorly reported story on a campus rape at the University of Virginia. It would have been timely in 1991 when Anita Hill was on Capitol Hill stating her case. (And when many other women who asked to testify about similar harassment and worse from then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas were silenced and ignored.) Frankly, its hard to think of a time when Actually wouldnt have been timely and perhaps it always will be.

So Actually by Anna Ziegler cant help but be timely. It could however be better. Impressively, Ziegler has a second drama onstage right now at the Roundabout called The Last Match. (Though Im an ardent tennis fan the setting of the play somehow I missed it.) Shes got a raft of film, tv and theater projects in the works and her play Boy was one of my favorites of last year. So its a shame to judge this as a let down. And judging is exactly what were teased/led/misdirected into doing.

Amber and Tom are two new students at Princeton. Its the first few weeks of their time on campus, an overwhelming experience for anyone. Theyre making friends, figuring out where their classes are and as college freshmen (freshpeople?) will flirting and sometimes hooking up. We see Amber (Alexandra Socha) and Tom (Joshua Boone) chatting at a party with Amber proposing an annoying ice breaker, sort of a truth or dare type game. Tom demurs until Amber says he should play...if he wants to sleep with her later. Tom immediately perks up in a gosh, really? eager beaver sort of way and off we go.

The next morning Amber sort of casually tells a friend who had been pressuring her to hook up with someone that he practically raped her. Soon the dorm adviser is insisting Amber has to take this trauma seriously, for other women if not for herself. Before we can decide whether Amber is being steamrolled or supported, shes filed a formal complaint and were watching them testify.

This isnt Witness For The Prosecution or an Afterschool Special; we assume there probably wont be a tearful confession or a satisfying sense that justice was served a la the end of most Law & Order episodes. Ambiguity is all in these modern times. But like the annoying, button-pushing Oleanna by David Mamet, the plays manipulation feels grating almost from the start. Every detail that they share feels like a piece of evidence. Any fact that seems to shore up Ambers side is certain to be followed by something positive about Tom. And every detail about one (Amber has feelings of inferiority) will immediately be followed by a similarly negative detail about the other (Tom says he had sex with a teacher in high school and mentions as an aside that she later said he was a little rough).

And so on and so forth, much like a tennis match, actually! Add up the points won and often the matches among top pros are pretty damn close, with just a few points separating the winners from the losers. Indeed, the plays most vivid comment is that the evidence will be stacked up on either side and the decision may come down to 50% and a feather, meaning if the facts are evenly split then even the smallest advantage on one side of the truth will prove all the difference.

In this case, the ever-shifting sands feel like a cheat. Life may be ambiguous and most cases of sexual harassment and assault and rape might be difficult to determine when all one has are the statements of two young adults. But Amber herself vacillates repeatedly on whether anything wrong actually occurred in the first place. (Of course, this can happen when women are shaped by society to accept harassment, assault and rape as the norm.) This seems to deserve a lot more attention than, say, past sexual history. (Tom had a lot; Amber very little.) Yet the show doesnt really delve into this dilemma so much as raise it as just one among a host of murky elements to consider.

Whatever went wrong here in the writing, Ziegler turned a pressing issue into a parlor game. Like Oleanna, it might raise blood pressure or stoke arguments but those after-show discussions are far more interesting than the drama that sparks them.

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