The Rubout / Anne of a Thousand Faces

*2 Psychological One-Acts* ATA presents "The Rubout" & "Anne of A Thousand Faces" THE RUBOUT (55 min) In a funeral home, an exhausted employee meets a stranger and is forced to face the decisions which have shaped his life. The Rubout is a taut two-handed psychological thriller with shifting perspectives… until the very end. ANNE OF A THOUSAND FACES (45 min) is a darkly funny, fast-moving new play about Anne Boleyn, artificial intelligence, artistic ambition, and who gets to control the story. An actor walks into an audition for a new Broadway play about Anne Boleyn—and immediately has notes. The script, she argues, gives Anne plenty to say but no life of her own. So the billionaire playwright-producer throws out the pages and proposes an experiment: forget the script. They’ll improvise instead. One by one, she becomes the Annes history has handed down to us—the doomed romantic, the seductress, the witch, the revolutionary—each with the same objective: survive the night and escape the executioner’s axe. Watching them is Common Thread, an experimental technology designed to measure how audiences make meaning and determine which version of a story will reach them. But as the audition becomes a battle over who Anne was, who gets to define her, and what an artist will sacrifice for the chance to be seen, the experiment begins revealing far more about the people conducting it than its supposed subject. Five hundred years after her death, everyone still wants something from Anne Boleyn. Maybe the problem is believing she has to be only one thing.