A Dialectic in Ferguson

HowlRound: This year at Tesseract Theatre, we wanted to start devising a piece with our ensemble that wouldn’t premiere until fall of 2016. I had planned on not narrowing down the subject matter of the piece for at least the first three or four months, wanting the younger acting artists we were working with to slowly realize what they had in common, take the time to share their experiences, and sift through their commonalities to discover something important they wanted to spend two years exploring. A month before we were planning to meet for the first time, a tragedy occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and the national spotlight became intensely focused on a harrowing problem embedded in many St. Louis communities.