The shooting of a young black male in Ferguson, and the ensuing riots, is generally portrayed as a racist event, but depending on where you stand, the racists can be white or black.

Verbatim Theatre is a genre where you take the actual evidence and lay it out in front of an audience. In Ferguson the Play the evidence is the actual testimony to the Grand Jury, presented to closely adhere to how the Jury heard it.

This is how playwright Phelim McAleer describes it:

The purpose of FERGUSON is to reveal the truth about what really happened on August 9, 2015 in Ferguson, MO and to look at why and how the Grand Jury came to the decision they did. FERGUSON is a staged version of the Grand Jury testimony exactly as they heard it. But this time the audience gets to be the Grand Jury. The performances in Los Angeles will be dramatized staged readings with interactive voting. Every night the audience will  decide who’s telling the truth, decide who’s lying, and decide if they would indict Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown. How will you vote?

McAleer claims:

A lot of people lied about what they saw that day. They lied to support both sides. They lied to the media, they lied online, and they lied to investigators. Many admitted this to the Grand Jury, but the media never corrected the record. 

Most people don’t know what the Grand Jury heard and most people don’t know that a lot of what alleged witnesses told the media was later withdrawn or proven impossible by evidence uncovered in the Grand Jury room.

Hopefully it will come out on video and we can all watch, and maybe even vote. An interesting exercise in making the truth available.