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.

From Staff Reports

Asheville Playback Theatre is tackling one of the toughest and most important issues the Asheville community faces with its March 16 show titled, “Let’s Talk About Race and Privilege.” The performance will take place Sunday at 7:00 p.m. at the NC Stage Company, off Walnut Street opposite Zambra’s.
The freedom to approach tough subjects is inherent in the way Playback performances work. They’re interactive theatre in which a member of the audience tells a story and the actors spontaneously perform it back to them. The story can be complicated or simple, happy or sad, emotional or dramatic - just as people’s lives are.

As company co-director Deb Scott puts it, “If you say, ‘I’m feeling rather tired today,’ that can be a story. It can stop there, or it can be explored further.” The actors might want to learn why the teller is tired, whether it’s a physical or mental exhaustion (or both), if specific incidents have brought you down, and so forth.

Playback companies use a combination of open-ended spontaneity with established forms and structure. After listening closely to a story, they quickly, silently determine the mood, style, and approach they will use. Then they deliver a fully realized performance using the most minimal tools: pieces of fabric as representative costume items, music, movement, and other acting techniques.

In some ways Playback is similar to the work of griots, the West African poets, musicians, and bards who are considered a repository of oral tradition. According to Paul Oliver in his book “Savannah Syncopators”, “Though [the griot] has to know many traditional songs without error, he must also have the ability to extemporize on current events . . .” Many also use their wit and knowledge for social comment.

Scott considers “starting the conversation” essential to bringing about change, which Asheville Playback accomplishes by inviting others to speak and listening to what they have to say. “What happens in Playback performances,” says Scott, “if the magic works, is the creation of a safe space where people can be heard.”

Asheville Playback has appeared in many spaces, including the YMI Cultural Center and the Stephens Lee Community Center, and the group performs regularly in area prisons. The company has also done quite a bit of work with adjudicated and at-risk youth. A year ago the company was asked to give a special performance to address the concerns of an ad-hoc group of mental health consumers. Some followed traditional treatment paths, others felt that they were looking at a broken system.”

“They’d had it,” says Scott. “We brought together those consumers with service providers and even some administrators. There was healing for each group, a tremendous amount of learning and exchange.”

During last year’s season, she adds, “each show had a theme that was provocative, but not necessarily grounded in current politics or specific to Asheville issues. So when we were planning for this year’s season, we thought, ‘Why not harness a hot topic that’s specific to Asheville?’”

Five members, including Scott, had visited Atlanta last fall for the U.S. Social Forum, a national gathering of grassroots organizations. The forum brought activists together from highly diverse communities, and while Asheville Playback has had two African American members, currently the sixteen-person company is all white. “We asked ourselves what work we could do [in order to] represent really diverse stories? And we partnered with a company from the Ashé Cultural Center (www.ashecac.org) in New Orleans, and a member of a Filipino group from San Francisco, a Chinese American woman from Oakland, a woman from Brooklyn…”

Coincidentally, company founder Raphael Peter had been hearing from a black friend that “the community is losing heart. She was saying, ‘People talk, but nothing changes.’ And my response was, ‘That’s what Playback is about! Playback companies all over deal with social justice, human rights issues.’”

In planning the current season, the members had coalesced around a focus on Community Concerns. One issue that emerged was the privileges that one race gains at the expense of others.

Among those privileges is the right to be heard; one of the fundamental complaints of every disempowered group is being ignored. “Listen to me. Pay attention to me,” demand the oppressed. And nobody does.

The actors in Playback do listen, and they hear. It seemed like a perfect fit to Raphael Peter.

“Our overarching theme is “building a community of neighbors,” and the foundation of Playback is to honor your story,” he says. “One of the key things we’ve learned is how the participants begin to develop listening skills. And what I’ve learned in Building Bridges is that people of color just want to be heard. So this performance is the perfect opportunity for people to be heard.”

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