The message from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was clear. California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, it concluded, saying, ”The Constitution simply does not allow for laws of this sort.” Those 11 little words changed the course of American civil rights history. Playwright Dustin Lance Black’s simply titled 8 is based on transcripts from Perry v. Brown (originally known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger), the case filed by the American Foundation for Equal Rights to overturn Proposition 8. The dialogue for today’s one-night-only reading, directed by the Alley Theatre’s Joe Angel Babb, features testimony and the closing arguments taken from the trial’s transcripts.
Via press materials, Black, a founding board member of AFER, says, ”People need to witness what happened in the Proposition 8 trial, if for no other reason than to see inequality and discrimination unequivocally rejected in a court of law where truth and facts matter.”
Mon., Sept. 10, 7:30 p.m., 2012
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.