Story
In February 2018 Tulane University announced that 41% of undergraduate women and 19% of undergraduate men reported being sexually assaulted while attending the college.
This revelation made national headlines and prompted a public outcry from students on campus. Over the course of the 2018/2019 school year, an eleven-member ensemble of Tulane students, working in collaboration with acclaimed New Orleans theater company Goat in the Road Productions and Professor Jenny Mercein, bravely bring intersectional struggles with sexual violence, racism, homophobia, addiction, and bodily safety to bear as they devise a theater piece that confronts rape and toxic culture on their campus. The approach to our work is grounded in the belief that a project about young people, for young people, needs to also be written by young people.
ROLEPLAY is an urgent coming-of-age story that follows a group of engaged young people as they navigate, through theater performance, the toxic cultures that infect life on campus.
Campus rape culture thrives on silence. ROLEPLAY gives students a voice and space.
Directed by Katie Mathews, ROLEPLAY explores a modern American college campus through the lens of social norms and social performance - how young people wear masks, code switch, and perform identities to survive. It's also about the power of art to transform our lives; throughout this avant-garde documentary, students use theater to create new narratives for themselves through characters, imagining the world they want to inhabit. The film lyrically weaves together the intimate rehearsal process, the raw personal struggles, and recreations of the script, where students re-write their own stories, revealing the healing power of creative spaces.

We have finished shooting and are in post-production! We need your help to finish the edit on this vibrant portrait of the next generation of artists and activists.
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