PCPA presents The Agitators 

Pacific Conservatory Theatre’s Solvang Festival Theatre season comes to a close with The Agitators, a powerful two-hander about two titans of America’s troubled history that runs for just 10 days, Aug. 29-Sept. 8. Focusing as much on the friendship between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony over the course of five decades as their tireless activism toward abolition and equal rights, the play moves from their meeting in Rochester in the 1840s when quests for freedom and equality collided over the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote, but not women. The play explores both the human side of the cultural icons’ alliance and the adversarial tension as they try to make change in the world.

Prior to The Agitators’ world premiere in Alabama in early 2020 – before George Floyd’s murder spurred the Black Lives Matter movement and before #MeToo crystallized with Harvey Weinstein’s conviction – playwright Mat Smart shared about the piece’s timing. “What scares me most about the political environment now is how it feels like there are two sides, and we’re not talking to one another,” he said. “The distance between people in this country seems to be growing greater and greater. And something that is so inspiring to me about Susan and Frederick was their ability to have a healthy, hard dialogue with the people they disagreed with, the people who hated them.”

In September 2020, PCPA kicked off its virtual InterPlay series with The Agitators. The Solvang shows extend PCPA’s area premiere of the play with a production that stars Polly Firestone Walker as Anthony and Cordell Cole as Douglass, helmed by PCPA artistic director and Dean Mark Booher. Visit www.pcpa.org.