A rehearsal of "Rachels," showing Rachel Crooks at different times in her life. Top, from left: Dan Jajewski, Meghan Randolph, Ana Gonzalez. Bottom row: Sarah Streich and Carrie Sweet.
One of local theater’s first forays into online productions is setting the bar high. The Pussy Grabber Plays, a production of The Voices Theatre Project, is a series of eight plays inspired by the women who have reported being sexually abused by Donald J. Trump. Yes, the current president, who has bragged publicly about groping women, has more than enough accusers to fill a night of theater. The one-night-only show has an all-star cast and takes place Friday, May 15, at 9 p.m. Watch their Facebook page for a link. Donations will be collected to benefit the Rape Crisis Center.
The Voices Theatre is a side project for director Meghan Randolph, executive director of Music Theatre of Madison. It is designed to share plays that “highlight how people have been systematically silenced,” says Randolph. The company’s last production was a reading of The Exonerated in 2017, which benefited the Wisconsin Innocence Project of UW-Madison Law School. In The Pussy Grabber Plays, the authors used actual stories as jumping-off points. “All except one are inspired by actual survivors, and in some cases, the survivors helped write the plays,” says Randolph.
The Pussy Grabber Plays has only been staged once, at a January 2019 show at Joe’s Pub in New York City. The playwrights are all female and mostly based in New York City: Julia Brownell, Sam Chanse, Halley Feiffer, Sharon Kenny, Melissa Li, Sharyn Rothstein, Natasha Stoynoff, Bess Wohl and Anna Ziegler. The New York Times reviewer called it “raucous” and “an act of vehement feminist protest.” The playwrights made the scripts available royalty-free if the show benefits an organization that serves women.
For Randolph, it was a perfect opportunity to produce an event that would rehearse and perform online under Gov. Evers' Safer at Home order. The 21 performers have been rehearsing in small groups via Zoom. Randolph didn’t have a hard time casting the show since Madison’s talent pool is waiting out the virus and all live theater has been canceled at least until Evers’ order is lifted. “I figured everyone’s looking for a project and this is a great opportunity to showcase a lot of talent and speak about a very real issue,” says Randolph.
The economic shutdown has also had a negative impact on local nonprofits, so Randolph says she is happy to create a show that will benefit an organization. “It’s a weird time to try to raise money,” she says. “I know that the Rape Crisis Center has had to cancel events and hasn’t been able to fundraise.”
Randolph says she is surprised at how adaptable these particular plays have been to the constraints of presenting online. “Most of these pieces actually work really well because it’s words and conversations; we’re not acting anything out or reenacting anything. There’s a simplicity to it,” says Randolph. Actors who are used to looking at each other need to look at the camera instead. And certain moments, like a scene where three women hug, have to be reimagined.
Longtime Madison actor and director Dana Pellebon performs in Credible Woman, the one purely fictional play of the evening. She plays Han, a character wrestling with guilt about not reporting an assault. The pieces, and the themes, resonate with Pellebon, who is the senior director of client services at the Rape Crisis Center.
“It deals with the feelings and guilt that come around not reporting an assault and not being part of the conversation because you chose not to report,” says Pellebon. “They go through why they feel guilty even though they didn’t do anything wrong.”
Pellebon says her character’s experience is more typical than most people think. “Only 33 percent of rapes are reported, and we think about this every day, why so many people stay silent. We know these stories because those are our clients.”
Although Trump’s list of accusers is long, Pellebon says it’s important to remember that the former reality TV star is protected by the same double standard that has shielded other abusers from facing repercussions. “We talk about it now, but has anything fundamentally changed? Our conversation hasn’t changed much. Do these plays surprise me? No. It saddens me that we are still having these conversations — not believing women and not holding men accountable.”
Pellebon says rehearsing the show without being in the room with the director or scene partner, Nikko Murphy, has been “weird,” but she feels lucky that the play adapts well to the format. “There are some inherent difficulties. But I keep thinking how cool is it that instead of saying we’re doing nothing, we’re bringing our medium to a different format?”
Randolph says the content of some of the plays could be triggering for survivors, but that she also believes that sharing their stories with the public provides an important public service. She recently learned that at least two of Trump’s accusers — Natasha Stoynoff (who also wrote one of the plays) and Karena Virginia — plan to tune in to the broadcast.
“The plays are all really different, but there is a through-line,” says Randolph. “I’m going to quote Lady Gaga, who said after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony [during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh], ‘The brain changes, and literally what it does is it takes the trauma and puts it in a box and files it away so that we can survive the pain.’
“In just about every play, the women are opening that box.”
[Editor's note: we corrected this article to note that the show is on Friday, May 15.]
