Stage preview: New drama delves into forced sterilization in the U.S.

Pittsburgh-based demaskus Theater Collective and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust will present the play “You Wouldn’t Expect,” based on government-sanctioned programs that sterilized 60,000 Americans.

The drama by Marilynn Barner Anselmi, a semifinalist at the 2013 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, focuses on the particularly aggressive North Carolina Eugenics Program that sterilized 8,000 people from the late 1920s to the mid 1970s. It was the only state that gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization