Eagle interview with Cobble Hill playwright Anna Ziegler on her new play ‘Actually’
The playwright Anna Ziegler possesses one of the boldest and most distinctive voices in contemporary American theater. Her masterful depictions of what was once colloquially called “the battle of the sexes” are as compelling and nuanced as anything Henrik Ibsen wrote or Ingmar Bergman directed. In the midst of wariness and misunderstanding, she is able to find moments of grace and tenderness. In her 2015 play “Photograph 51,” which was produced on the West End in a heralded production starring Nicole Kidman as the English scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose central, indispensable role in the discovery of DNA was shamefully marginalized by James Watson and Francis Crick, Ziegler could easily have portrayed Franklin as a martyr. Ziegler scrupulously avoids that cliche.
Similarly, in her new play “Actually,” which opens Aug. 9 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in a co-world premiere production between Williamstown and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, Ziegler’s characters Amber and Tom, two students at the center of a date rape incident on Princeton’s campus, are not merely social case studies, but fully realized, complicated individuals. Buried just below the surface of their banter and posturing is longing and sadness, which Ziegler is astute enough not to italicize. And there is no tidy ending that wraps everything up. As with the classic Akira Kurosawa film “Rashomon,” we are left not knowing where the truth resides. And, anyway, whose truth would it be? At the beginning and at the end of “Actually”, Amber and Tom play a game called “Two Truths and a Lie.” The first time it’s played as a lark, the second time the stakes are much higher.
Below are edited excerpts from a recent email interview with Ziegler.
