History, social justice & cuisine collide for You Wouldn’t Expect

An award-winning new play exploring a very difficult and often ignored chapter of American history is coming to town for a special limited engagement at the recently reopened the August Wilson Center. A bold and informative play, Marilynn Barner Anselmi‘s You Wouldn’t Expect examines real-life events surrounding the North Carolina Eugenics Program, which sterilized 8,000 women between 1933 and 1973.

Presented by demaskus Theater Collective in conjunction with several major initiatives—Women’s History Month, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust‘s SHE SAID 2016 program and New Voices Pittsburgh’s Women of Color HERStory series—the powerful play focuses on a group of characters whose lives were dramatically impacted by sterilization that was undertaken in the southern state as part of a national eugenics program that forcibly sterilized some 60,000 women.