Renaissance Theaterworks Explores Consent in "Actually”

When playwright Anna Ziegler was interviewed in American Theatre Magazine about her new social issue drama Actually, she said, “I’m often drawn to stories that examine the nature of ‘the truth,’ in which multiple perspectives reveal the impossibility of a single definitive version of events.”

That is exactly what audiences will find fascinating – and frustrating – about Renaissance Theaterworks’ current production of Ziegler’s play, focusing on the conflicting, and equally credible, accounts of what happened one night between two college freshmen at Princeton after a drunken house party. Sensitively directed by Mary MacDonald Kerr and featuring two fantastic actors, the play delves headlong into the issue of consent, a university’s response to an allegation of rape, and the repercussions of the accusation for both students. In examining these weighty subjects, the play stubbornly refuses to answer the questions it raises. It simply creates more questions about how to define “yes” and how to communicate “no.”

Picked up by regional theaters at the height of the #MeToo movement, Actually could not have been more relevant when it premiered in 2017. Headlines about sexual assault on college campuses were frequent and horrifying. President Obama tried to address the problem by requiring universities to take sexual harassment seriously as part of the Title VI, or lose their federal funding. Then Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reversed that stand just a few years later and turned it on its head, by forcing higher education to give more protections to the accused than the accusers.

The issue of rape culture and consent was also all over the media. Harvey Weinstein’s movie empire was toppled when actresses and former employees – a handful of his victims of decades of sexual harassment and assault – finally came forward with their stories. In politics, Christine Blasey Ford gave testimony that Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh had drunkenly assaulted her in college. And just like Anita Hill’s testimony of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas hearings 30 years prior, those accusations did nothing to sway lawmakers into reconsidering the candidates.

So clearly, the more things change. . . Which brings us to RTW’s current production, running through April 3. Originally scheduled for the company’s 2019-2020 season, Actually was shut down by the pandemic just a week before opening, and a rudimentary videotape of a dress rehearsal was released online in the early days of the lockdown. Now the play is back, in person, in Renaissance’s new home, with a new cast – Eva Nimmer (Amber) and Preston Tate Jr. (Tom) – and Kerr, the original director.

Nimmer is superb as Amber, an awkward, white Jewish girl who is away from home for the first time and struggling on every front. Uncomfortable with her body and painfully self-conscious, she is overwhelmed by her classes at an Ivy League school, her schedule as a member of the squash team, and the pressure she feels to fit in. To her, “fitting in” means drinking a lot, going to parties, and having sex, even though her previous experiences with intimacy have been stifling and disastrous. Talking a mile-a-minute, constantly fidgeting with her oversized sweater and fussing with her hair, Nimmer’s Amber is weird. And sweet. And damaged. And desperate. And especially susceptible to what other people think. And trying to find a way to escape a cacophony of insecurities screaming in her head. And one night in October, escaping meant getting wasted on tequila shots and inviting a guy from her psych class to sleep with her.

Even more impressive is Preston Tate’s Tom, a young Black guy who is also going through his share of angst about fitting in at the overwhelmingly white, upper-class, elite school. The first person from his family to go to college, he is terrified of disappointing his mom and determined not to follow in his absent father’s footsteps. A musical prodigy who is used to being racially profiled, he is also looking for an escape, particularly after feeling betrayed by his only friend at college, and hearing the news that his mother is gravely ill. Following the “rules” of hook-up culture, his solace comes from a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex that is meant to be fun, brief, and emotionally limited. As Tom, Tate is a spring wound too tightly that could go off at any minute. Leaning forward on the balls of his feet, he seems always ready to flee. His impressive pivots from rage to despair, from smartass to player, from protected to vulnerable are split-second revelations. He also completely transforms in an instant when embodying all the other characters in his stories, separating multiple roles clearly and simply.

Both characters reveal ugly and poignant things about their past. Both are naive, relatively inexperienced and dumb, in the way that all 18 year-olds are dumb, and have been, since the beginning of time. They are tsunamis of bad decision-making and self-doubt. They are hurt and they don’t know how to express it. Because of that, they are both making big mistakes.

So who’s right? What really happened? What are the consequences of this sloppy hook-up? It’s up to each individual audience member to decide. During the play it’s very easy to identify with, and sympathize with both characters by turn. It’s easy to really dislike both of them as well. It’s also tempting to see the script as a cop-out by the playwright, who piles complication on top of complication for both characters, which doesn’t make the story more complex, just bogged down with an unbelievable, Greek tragedy’s worth of misery and pathos on each side.

In addition, the conflict in Actually has become more difficult to parse because this is no longer 2017. The other shift has occurred in our social consciousness between the conception of the play and this production is the dramatically increased voice of the Black Lives Matter movement. And since Tom is Black and his accuser Amber is white, an already complicated “he-said, she said” has another substantial, fraught layer to contend with, one that frequently cuts through the other ambiguity. When Amber references Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird during her hearing with university officials, it’s hard not to suddenly see the parallel of an unhappy, damaged white woman taking her hurt out on a Black man who was nice to her. And the generations of Black men who were vilified, arrested, or worse because they made a white woman uncomfortable.

On the other hand, according to the program notes, the entire question of whether Amber consented to sex may be moot because in her inebriated state, she wasn’t actually capable of saying “yes.”

So clearly, the more things change. . . I hope that everyone who sees Actually grapples with the questions presented. That is clearly what the play is for.

Post Script

Renaissance Theaterworks Explores Consent in "Actually”