Date Rape and Respresentation: Theater and Social Change

"What's the difference between a diplomat and a lady? When a diplomat says yes he means maybe, when a diplomat says maybe, he means no; when a diplomat says no he's no diplomat. When a lady says no, she means maybe; when she says maybe, she means yes; when a lady says yes, she's no lady."

"The difference between being raped and being run over by a truck is that people ask you if you enjoyed it."

--from Calling It Rape,at the Lyman Common Room, April 21, 24 and 25 at 8 pm

Dulcy Anderson, speaking on her involvement in the Calling It Rape project, says "I knew when I started how I felt about rape. I never knew how men feel. I didn't want to know what men were thinking because I just didn't care. It wasn't worthy of notice."

Calling It Rape, directed by Sonia Rasminsky, makes both men and women's experience with date rape an issue undeniably "worthy of notice." The production involves three men (Donald Britton, Sam Ferre, Robert deNeufville) and four women (Dulcy Anderson, Elizabeth Humphrey, Mary Dixie Carter, Daniela Raz). Jessye Lapenn, one of the coordinators to Take Back the Night events this year, praised Calling It Rape. "It was important for us to involve art in our discussions of rape and domestic violence. Art has been used to subjugate women and women's bodies in subtle ways; it's important to reclaim it as grounds for sociopolitical engagement."

Lapenn thought of Rasminsky immediately as the prime person to run the theater project. Rasminsky, who was last year's president of the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club, has a history of involvement with feminist theater: The Stronger, Curves, 'night, Mother and In the Boom Boom Room.

She has a strong belief in committed theater, theater which acts as a catalyst for social change. Rasminsky recalls, "I had seen this group called New Landscapes, that works with kids in lockup, they do monologues of Shakespeare interspersed with their own lives--Hamlet, here's this kid who comes home and his father's dead and his mother remarries, and he's really pissed. They did it in ways these kids could really relate to, be inspired by. And then I thought, what if we could do it with this, and I got really excited."

There was, however, a difficulty getting men to be excited about participating in a play about rape. Rasminsky remarked, "It's hard to get men to put themselves on the stage in a play in which they are going to be the 'not-nice' people for at least some of the time." Robert deNeufville, one the male cast members, concurred: "I didn't want to identify with my characters, I didn't want to be associated with them."

The male actors spoke about fear that they would be seen only in the role of the aggressor. They pointed out that men can also be victimized by the rape of women when that woman is a sister, a mother, a girlfriend. Looking at it from that perspective, as Daniela Raz suggests, "It doesn't have to be women against men [in fighting date rape]. It can be victims and lovers of victims against victimizers and perpetrators."

The project demonstrates that date rape is sometimes simply the result of tragic misunderstanding. The opening number of Calling It Rape includes simultaneous monologues by a man and a woman, two versions of the same evening, the same series of events, with altogether different consequences for each of them.

Elizabeth Humphrey commented, "It's about who understands what and when they understand it and why aren't two people communicating?" An excerpt from Margaret Atwood's Rape Fantasies is used in the project, describing the fear of the both sexes that "it's getting so you can hardly be social anymore. How can you meet anyone if you can't trust them that basic amount?"

Theater is particularly effective in communicating the ambiguities involved in the question of sexual consent versus sexual acquiescence. Rasminsky juxtaposes two versions of the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire in which Stanley carries Blanche off to bed, the first version as a seduction, the second as a rape: the dialogue in both versions is identical, suggesting that the question of literal consent remains problematic. Raz contends that popular culture pretends that consent is not problematic: "Stanley is a big bad hero, infamously protrayed by Marlon Brando. But a lot of our literary heroes depend on power and sexual control."

As for representation of the actual act of violence, Rasminsky says, "I felt very strongly that showing a rape on stage would not be productive. There's a tendency in portraying rape scenes to be titillating. It becomes very voyeuristic, that's something we're trying to avoid."

Rasminsky also transcribed Harvard students' experiences of date rape. Elizabeth spoke of adapting one of the transcripts: "It was so easy to see all the stupid details that would have happened, it was so real, those women who gave us those stories have made this work more alive and complex and real."

Dulcy Anderson described efforts to do this piece from multiple perspectives, without giving up her own feminist sensibility: "It was really threatening sometimes, but in the end I don't feel like we've had to make compromises."