Will is alsoĪn NPC men’s physique competitor. He is a certified personal trainer who operates his own business, DorseyFit where #MusclesAintFree. Will coached at Knoxville College after graduating and coached AAU basketball for several years. Will is an active member of the greatest fraternity on the planet “Omega Psi Phi Inc”. He is a Knoxville College Alum (98-02) and captain of the basketball team where he is the all-time leading scorer with 2021 career points. I hope we become both reacquainted with our favorite early 2000s hit songs and with the wild practice of breathing together in the same room and recognizing the deep vulnerability and miraculousness of being human together. I hope we will discover how to be more human and present with each other. I’m also just really excited to hang out in this bar with all of you. Not only do our divisive ideologies implode when they collide with someone else’s humanity, but I also hope our pessimism about our world is imploded by the collision with community and human decency that we have so little come to expect. And I love that in this story, we get to see real people deal with other real people, as we also come back to the theatre and do the same. Those who we insist are not our neighbors, who vote differently than us, have different levels of education and different access to information and opportunities-aided by both social media algorithms and a global pandemic, those people largely don’t exist in flesh and blood. One way we find that belonging is through finding a ‘them.’ If there is a ‘them,’ that means there is an ‘us.’ Saying our country is divided is such a grotesque understatement, but I think that in addition to many other things, we have been not only allowed but rewarded for dehumanizing the ‘them’ who only exist for us in our screens. Longing to be seen and to deeply belong are intrinsic to being human, and we will go to extreme lengths in pursuit of just that. I know I felt a loss of dignity, and a longing to be seen. Many of us have had to untether ourselves from a work identity so deeply entrenched in our utter sense of self. In a country that values work and what you do above all else, what does it mean to be unemployed, or at least not employed in the context by which we have all somewhat defined ourselves. Sure, none of us have ever been though anything like the last 2 years, but many of us are people who have recently become deeply reacquainted with financial insecurity, desperation, and isolation. Not only does the pandemic economy mirror the one of 2008, but all of the trappings that come with a recession are there, too. ‘The before times.’ The time perhaps naively we thought we could survive. There’s a line in a play that I love that says, “Nostalgia’s just longing for the time that you knew you could survive.” As survivors of the last 2 years of the pandemic are no stranger to that longing. And yet, history repeats itself, and both reminds us that we have been here before and also seduces us to believe in a ‘before time’ that was better. And to some extent, all of us have bought into the American dream, right? That hard work leads to reward, leads to life-that good things come to those who work. Those of us who have lived with mostly unacknowledged privilege have gotten to buy into the narrative of exaggerated progress and equality. Racism and classism are certainly not things we buried back in any of those years, and if anything we have come to a moment of an embarrassingly late collective consciousness around the ‘isms’ that our country was built upon. And yet, I feel the urgency of this play stronger than ever. River & Rail was first going to do this play in 2020. She started writing it in 2011, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. She was fascinated with the disappearance of these small industrial towns across the U.S, and what she found were people who talked about their town in the past tense. Lynn Nottage started writing this play when she went to Reading, Pennsylvania to meet and interview people who worked in the steel industry there.
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