You Wouldn’t Expect

American Bard Theater Company

The Chain Theatre, Midtown Manhattan, NYC

American Bard Theater Company presents the New York City premiere of You Wouldn’t Expect, a play written by Marilynn Barner Anselmi examining the staggering truths about the coercive influence of the government-sponsored eugenics program and its direct focus on poverty and race. Cezar Williams directs a cast of eight, including Cherie Danielle, Adiagha Faizah, Carl Fisk, Erin Gilbreth*, Ross G. Hewitt, Malikha Mallette, Okema T Moore*, and Atiya Yanique Taylor.

You Wouldn’t Expect unfolds at a local Eugenics office in 1960’s North Carolina where we see the cat-and-mouse workings of the two women who work there.  Here, four African-American woman are pressured to be sterilized, part of a racist practice sanctioned by our government for over a decade.  We are also brought to the squalid shack of a pedophile father angling to get his daughter “fixed” so that he won’t have to deal with outcome of his actions, the offspring. The North Carolina Board enabled county departments of public welfare to petition the Board to sterilize their clients. The majority of these sterilizations were coerced, and academic sources have observed that this was not only an ableist and classist project but also a racist one. Of the 7,686 people who were sterilized in North Carolina after 1933, 5,000 were Black.  The Board remained in operation until 1977.