Interact Theatre Company presents Seth Rozin's 'Human Rites'

The latter group might want to skip InterAct's production — but they shouldn't. It's a skillfully wrought, intelligent drama about a subject so controversial the experts aren't even sure what to call it: the gruesome female genital mutilation or the more benign term female circumcision.

Studies in discomfort

Veteran professor Alan (Joe Guzmàn) visits Dean Michaela (Kimberly S. Fairbanks) in her splendidly professional wood-paneled office (set by Colin McIlvaine). Their initial chatter reveals their affair many years before, but soon gives way to the reason Michaela summoned Alan: he has written a paper, shared with his sophomore Cultural Psychology students, and Michaela is demanding a retraction.

Female genital circumcision, Alan asserts, is a practice in many African cultures that women actually approve. The students, and Michaela, think his findings are "misguided and toxic," in part because Alan, a white man, cannot appreciate women's experience, let alone the plight of African women.

"I assumed it was barbaric, demeaning," he explains, but stands by his conclusion. "This is science," he insists.

"Your paper offends me," states Michaela. Even their ideas of science differ. Michaela, a biologist, finds psychology "fuzzy."

"We have to respect cultural differences," Alan says.

"So, if a culture practices slavery," Micaela counters, "we should accept it?" Their engrossing debate, expertly directed by Harriet Power, never falters or feels forced.

Rozin skillfully adds layers of their past relationship. Was Alan's attraction to Michaela, a black woman, more anthropological than personal? "You exoticize and fetishize black women," she insists.

Another point of view

Their riveting debate changes midway through the one-scene play when Michaela invites Lydia (Lynnette R. Freeman) — a graduate student from Sierra Leone, whom Michaela hopes will disprove Alan's findings — into the conversation.

Lydia's frank revelations about traditions and how the study of different cultures can descend into judgment stun Michaela, Alan, and the audience. Westerners "love being the arbiters of what is civilized," Lydia asserts, challenging both academics — and us — to rethink assumptions. Human Rites is lively before Lydia's arrival, but soars with mind-blowing ideas after.

Anticipating controversy, InterAct hosts post-show discussions and offers audiences additional resources, including links to works that inspired Rozin and a personal endorsement from its female dramaturg, Kittson O'Neill. No doubt some will question Rozin's suitability, as a white American man, to write this play, and Power's ability, as a white American woman, to direct it. These debates will be as fascinating (and as heated) as the clashes in Human Rites.

Some might wonder, too, why InterAct produces its own founder and artistic director's works — though, in its defense, Human Rites exemplifies InterAct's mission and 30-year history of intelligent, socially aware issue plays.

I resist the notion that theater artists must belong to a culture or ethnicity to portray it, which clashes with the idea of theater as an art form based on pretending — which, hopefully, is honest, accurate, and responsible.

If we limit playwrights solely to their lived experience, we could never enjoy Human Rites' debate between characters from three different cultures, since neither Rozin nor anyone else belongs to all three. I look forward, however, to learning why I am wrong.