‘Actually’ at Aurora Theatre in Berkeley explores gray areas of sex consent

A “she said, he said” play about sexual assault sounds like it would be the kind of thing where audience members are invited to make up their own minds about what actually happened.

Certainly that’s somebody’s task in “Actually,” the two-person play by Anna Ziegler now playing on Aurora Theatre Company’s second stage, but that somebody is an unseen panel conducting a sexual misconduct hearing involving two Princeton freshmen.

What’s striking about Amber and Thomas’ accounts, however, is not how much their accounts differ but how much they match. They flirted, they drank too much, they flirted some more, they made out, they had sex. What differs, of course, is primarily what was going through their minds at the time.

We don’t hear their testimony in the hearing, just their tag-team, stream-of-consciousness internal monologues that fly freely from the questions they’re being asked: their first meeting, what happened that night, earlier sexual encounters with other people and various other factors of their respective states of mind. These monologues always run along parallel lines, switching back and forth frequently, always landing on the same shared experiences at the same time.

Ella Dershowitz’s Amber is anxious and insecure, talking constantly with near-manic energy, and she’s super, super into Thomas. Dershowitz plays an awkward teenager with eerie verisimilitude, from the fast-talking adolescent drawl to the caved-in, fidgety body language. In fact, one might mistake her for a high school freshman rather than a college freshman, which lends itself to the impression that any sexual encounter would be taking advantage of her.

Michael A. Curry’s Thomas is much more measured and deliberate, not in a cagey way but simply accustomed to having to be careful to avoid missteps. The fact that he’s a young black man and Amber is a young white Jewish woman is something that everyone involved knows tips the scales against him in any situation like this, because people are often predisposed to view him as an aggressor in American society. Thomas is also smoothly charismatic, a bit of a player with women while Amber is accustomed to feeling invisible and giddy just to be noticed.

Director Tracy Ward gives the play a brisk staging against a simple, shallow white-on-white set by Giulio Perrone. Sound designer James Ard keeps an unnerving, constant drone underlying the action, increasing in prominence as the tension grows.

Jim Cave’s moody lighting keeps shifting along with the swapping speakers. It’s not just that lights go up on one actor as they go down on the other, but a frame of light around part of the set changes color — and yes, it often turns pink when the woman speaks and blue when the man speaks.

Some of the imagery in the play is pretty heavy-handed, particularly at the end, but strong performances and fascinating character portraits help keep the play grounded. The evidence, such as it is, seems so heavily weighted toward one character that it’s hard to imagine the other perspective on whether what happened warrants legal or quasi-legal action, although both students are portrayed with such sympathy that even they can’t help but fret over what each other are going through.

Of course, the accounts as relayed to the audience are not necessarily an indication of how the proceeding is going to go. In fact, the play is as much about the arcane quasi-judicial proceedings of university disciplinary hearings as it is about gray areas of consent. (According to an interview in the program, Ziegler’s lawyer husband had a new job overseeing such cases at NYU when she wrote the play.)

At a time when education secretary Betsy DeVos has particularly targeted campus sexual harassment and assault hearings with new guidelines weighted heavily in favor of the accused, a play like “Actually” makes the discussion about the current system uncomfortably complicated.

‘ACTUALLY’

By Anna Ziegler, presented by Aurora Theatre Company

Through: May 5

Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley

Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $35-$70; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org