This Much I Know

By Jonathan Spector
Originally Produced at Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley, CA
Previews begin September 2, 2022



The writer of Eureka Day returns to Aurora with an explosively theatrical interrogation of agency and culpability. Through his all-too-personal lectures on psychology, Lukesh attempts to unravel a mystery with his wife Natalya at the center. What happened to Natalya? The search for answers will launch us on a time-hopping fugue, weaving together the stories of Stalin’s daughter defecting to America, the son of a white supremacist growing to doubt the beliefs he was raised with, and the secret despair of becoming an accidental killer. How do we truly make decisions? How do we change our minds? And what does it mean to be complicit?

Artistic Statement: Playwright Jonathan Spector is an important voice in the Bay Area theatre community and in the national theatre scene, as he showed with Aurora's world premiere production of Eureka Day. Now Jonathan returns to Aurora with the world premiere of This Much I Know, a timely and highly theatrical play that exposes the cognitive illusions that trap us as we consider questions of responsibility and culpability. Weaving together the stories of an accidental killer, the son of a prominent White Supremacist, and the daughter of Josef Stalin defecting to the United States, Jonathan inspires us to ask hard questions about our role within systems we did not choose. And because this is a Jonathan Spector play, the human story is always present, and the play will inspire as much laughter as contemplation and deep emotional resonance. This kind of intellectually engaging work that operates on a compellingly intimate level is central to Aurora's relationship to storytelling for our community. I can't wait to share this play with our audience and the wider world.

Grant Statement: The Edgerton Award will provide for an extra week of rehearsal for This Much I Know, which will be essential to our ability to give the play the kind of production it deserves. Jonathan will be present throughout the rehearsal process, tightening and improving the script in a way that can only happen with the entire artistic team in the room, and that requires additional time to incorporate these changes to the script. Furthermore, the script calls for all sorts of stage magic to give full expression to the cognitive illusions it presents. The extra week of rehearsal will be instrumental in planning, preparing, staging, and rehearsing the many magical and theatrical moments that bind the structure of the play together. Aurora Theatre Company is tremendously grateful to the Edgerton Foundation for believing in and supporting this process and this remarkable play.

Directed by Josh Costello