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.

What does improvisational theatre have to do with social concerns?

Not much, if your idea of improv is “Whose Line is it Anyway?” But improv can be an opportunity to see real life stories made into moments of theatre — and those stories can be the stories of the struggle to create new thinking, new worlds and new understanding. This is what playback theatre is all about.

All over the world, playback groups are performing a unique kind of improv, based on honoring personal stories. Many playback companies choose to use their talents to educate, to mediate, or to bring people who have been antagonists into dialogue. Some examples of this include a company in Northern Ireland that works with Catholic and Protestant youth; a group in India that performs stories across the historical divides of caste and class; several New Zealand companies that train Maori as well as white actors to portray the difficult stories of racism and colonialism; and German companies that invite all their citizens affected by World War II to finally tell the stories they have kept silent for generations.

Asheville Playback Theatre, the local playback company, is joining in this movement to bring social issues into the theatre. We are offering a Community Concerns series this season. We are inviting audiences who are interested in hearing and telling stories about topics that affect our life here in this part of our world. A few months ago the topic was “Let’s Talk About Race and Privilege.” We hoped the show could begin a dialogue about some of the ways race and privilege have shaped our thinking, and has both divided and brought people together.

Asheville Playback Theatre (APT) is currently an all-white company. In preparation for this show, actors were extremely concerned about taking on a topic of this enormity. We spent time rehearsing (as we always do) with our own stories, stories about our experiences of our race and the ways we do and do not have privilege in our lives. We found we have plenty of feelings about this issue, and channeled that into our acting.

We spent time reading articles and asking questions of our friends and neighbors. We invited people to a rehearsal, people whose color or ethnicity was different from ours, and listened to them, and practiced our craft with their input. Several of us attended the Building Bridges class. We were guests at a public housing development, and introduced a multi-generational group to playback as a tool to look at their community as it is now, and as they would like it to be. We reminded ourselves that as playback actors, our intention is to listen deeply to what we hear, attempting to remove our personal filters, and then use our creative tools to reflect back the teller’s experience. The goal is always to honor our story teller, whoever that person is. Sometimes we fall short of truly capturing what is important to the teller, and then we all learn from this, too.

Playback is not only about skillful acting, beautiful music and a breathless moment of theatre. It does happen, and when it does, it is captivating. But playback is also about bearing witness to the person who is courageous enough to speak their truth on a topic that holds deep meaning. It is about a theatre filled with people who do not know each other, who come together to learn something new about their neighbors and themselves. It is about willingness to listen beyond what you know, and be touched by another person. And then it is about the sense that My story is actually Our story, and we are more the same than we are different.

APT welcomes any and all to come and continue this dialogue on Race and Privilege.

We have a lot to talk about.

This performance is endorsed by Building Bridges who offers ongoing opportunities by “Going beyond Racism through Understanding and Respect.”

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