I got a lot of inspiration for my newest play while reading "The Exonerated." For one, I learned that a play with distinctly dark themes can, and perhaps should, contain some moments of humor. But while "The Exonerated" was a play about the death penalty, I want to write a piece about rape. In my head, this piece
is emotional and unsettling, but also has some surprising moments of
levity. There has been a lot of discussion in popular culture lately about rape jokes, and more extreme kinds of humor in general- whether such humor is ever funny, or justified, or allowable. I want to write a play in which the audience laughs- several times, hopefully- but never at the victim. I envision an all-female cast because a lot of the proponents of these types of jokes are men, and I want to give the men in the audience access to a conversation that they may not otherwise have access to, a more honest conversation, about how women respond to rape.
The other thing that I learned from "The Exonerated" is that my play should contain a strong, specific call to action. I struggled with this in "The Exonerated" because I felt it didn't have one. But in a play about rape, I think the call to action is
simple- I want people to feel like they can talk about sexual assault, as they experienced it.
I want to create a head space where people feel safe to share what
happened to them, and how they feel about it- all the guilt, shame,
excuses, regrets, and other non-P.C. things that people feel. I want everyone to feel like they can bring something to the
conversation, and I want everyone to feel heard. I haven't heard that
conversation take place before, and I think that that conversation could
help people.
2 comments:
Iris, I will write more soon, but I just wanted to mention two plays: Facing Forward and The Vagina Monologues. I'm sure you've heard of Ensler's play, but I hadn't heard of Facing Forward. It's done in Denver every year and is a documentary theatre piece about women's experiences with rape that raises money to get victims help.
Iris,
The first thing I notice about this proposal is this concept of “safe space” and its centrality to theatre that is for and/or by survivors of sexual violence. Ming came into the course focused on giving this concept a language and providing it a set of reliable instructions, and she writes about it in her abstract, so I guess one question I have for you is whether you are after the same thing. Another question I would like to see you answer is the necessity of inclusiveness. Is it really true that all views are welcome in your audience? For instance, if this play means to address men, will it include confessions of assault? Which leads me to ask, can victim and perpetrator share a safe space? (Of course, this is not to say that all aggressors are male, or that all victims are female—the latter is especially important, I think.) And what about this issue of precedent? As Amy points out, there is an established way of orchestrating this conversation. Take Back The Night is the real-world source for a documentary approach to the performed representation of rape. If you are interested in something different—say, a less testimonial approach—you will need to develop your own account of what is foreclosed by the enunciative possibilities of a play like The Vagina Monologues. Such an analysis seems pretty fruitful since knowing what you don’t want makes it much easier to conceptualize what you do want.
Finally, humor is a really interesting but tricky subject. Again, I want to know a lot more specifics about the kind of laughter you seek. Humor can of course be a remedy to drama that is too admonitory, but it can also be a useful means to question decorum and to talk about what is appropriate (think Titus’s laughter in Titus Andronicus). It is in this last respect that humor might be a powerful mechanism in your play.
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