Actors Theatre KC will host a free post-show Perspectives Forum and discussion of their current production, Taking Sides by Ronald Harwood.

Kansas City, MO - infoZine - The panel will feature Andrew Bergerson, UMKC History, the play's director Tom Mardikes and cast members, including Mark Robbins and Gary Holcombe. The panel and audience members will discuss the controversial issues explored in the play surrounding arts vs. politics and collaboration with the Nazis in World War II and during the Holocaust. Taking Sides is a fictional account of the American interrogation of real life German orchestra conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler.

Perspectives Forum will be held after the Saturday, August 23rd 7:30 evening performance and will begin at 9:45 p.m. at H & R Block City Stage in Union Station. Patrons may attend the play or join afterwards for the discussion. There is no charge for the panel discussion.

Professor Andrew Stuart Bergerson is an historian of everyday life whose research focuses on modern Germany. His first book, Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (Bloomington, 2004) used interviews with elderly Germans who lived in the provincial town of Hildesheim in north-central Germany to investigate the role of ordinary Germans in the Nazi revolution. In it he reconstructed the shockingly normal process by which friends and neighbors became Aryans and Jews. In addition to numerous articles, his new book addresses directly the question of responsibility on the part of ordinary Germans. In it, he and his three co-authors compare philosophical, literary, and theological arguments about how to take responsibility with the actual behavior of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich, in particularly such everyday strategies as irony, modeling, nonconformity, parody, and self-deception. The resulting analysis, forthcoming as The German Sisyphus, or the Happy Burden of History, not only helps us understand how ordinary Germans, like Wilhelm Furtwangler, could imagine that they were keeping their distance from the Nazi regime and yet became complicit nonetheless; it also helps us to understand how we, as ordinary people, can "take sides" today in our everyday life.

Taking Sides runs in rotating rep with Translations by Brian Friel through August 31st. Tickets are available at 816.235.6222 or at www.kcactors.org

For more info on the Perspectives Forum please email

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"Taking Sides" at the Actor's Theatre Kansas City, Review
By Jeannine Chatterton-Papineau - Actors Theatre Kansas City continues its examination of oppression and the human spirit with their presentation of Taking Sides by Ronald Harwood.