Newsmakers, March 16, 2017

Inspired by the phrase “alternative facts,” coined by White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway shortly after Donald Trump became president, a group from La Crosse involved in performance art started The “Alternative Truth” Project.

“That whole unbelievable statement from Kellyanne Conway had just come out when she said, ‘Well he was talking about alternative facts,’” said longtime theater director Anne Drecktrah, one of the project founders.

“We thought it would be a good way to juxtapose those two concepts (truth and alternative facts) and hopefully people would go, ‘Oh, that’s kind of amusing, how clever,’” she continued.

For at least the next several months, the group of local actors, directors, performers and writers is staging monthly table readings of plays with political relevance, hoping to start a dialogue with people from different political ideologies.

“We’re hoping to inspire people to look at things differently,” said University of Wisconsin-La Crosse theater professor Greg Parmeter. “Not through the prism of politics or policy or ideology, but through the prism of our common humanity.”

Members performed an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” in February at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse.

While attendance was good, the crowd was filled with progressives who wanted to vent about what was happening in the United States and overshadowed people who identified as moderate. The conversation lacked conservative viewpoints, something organizers are hoping to get in the future.

“This potentially could be a safe forum to begin to bring people together who have different points of view to begin to talk about,” the definition of truth, said retired La Crosse teacher Wendy Mattison. “The alternative is to allow the politicians from Washington, D.C. to separate us into the winners and the losers.”

The next reading is “Inherit The Wind,” a 1955 play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee which fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes trial about the teaching of evolution in a high school science class in Dayton, Tennessee.

The performance and discussion will be from 7:30-10 p.m. Friday, March 31, at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 401 W. Ave. S., La Crosse.

The performances are free and will be at different locations from theaters to churches in the La Crosse area. Anyone can view the play readings and participate in the discussion.