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Tiffany Hanssen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen, in for Alison Stewart. In a new play, seven college students gather for a DIY self-defense class after their classmate and sorority girl, Susanna, is brutally beaten and raped. The play is titled How to Defend Yourself. Before I continue, I want to just give a quick note to our listeners. Heads up content warning about this segment. The interview is going to touch on topics surrounding rape and sexual assault, specifically involving women.

This might be a good time to put on some headphones if you're around younger listeners or if you need to find some time to listen online later, you can always go to wnyc.org. If you need support, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800-656-4673. They are available 24 hours a day. The play is titled How to Defend Yourself. The Rapists are two members of a popular fraternity on campus who've since been taken into custody while Susanna is in the hospital and in her honor, two of the victim's sorority sisters, Brenda and Cara, Cara, Cara, Cara.

Steph Paul: Cara.

Tiffany Hanssen: Cara have decided to teach other students how to defend themselves from a possible assault. The show touches on themes such as safety, desire, consent, and trauma through humor, honest reflections from each of the characters. How to Defend Yourself won the Yale Drama Series Prize, was an international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist, and was featured on the Kilroys List. The play is now running at New York Theatre Workshop through April 2nd. Today, we're joined by the play's directors.

Steph Paul is a director, choreographer, and creative who in addition to also being a co-director on the show, worked on the movement. Happy birthday, Steph.

Steph Paul: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Tiffany Hanssen: Rachel Chavkin is also a co-director. She received the 2019 Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and other Critics Circle Award for Best Director of a Musical Hadestown. Rachel, welcome.

Rachel Chavkin: Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Tiffany Hanssen: Thank you. Liliana Padilla is the playwright and a co-director. Their work explores the community, body, power, and healing. Liliana also teaches at Dartmouth College and is the Sewanee-- Sewanee?

Liliana Padilla: Sewanee.

Tiffany Hanssen: Sewanee. It's a little lower coming in there. Sewanee Writers Conference. Liliana, thank you for being here. I want to talk with you first about the origins of the play. You have said in interviews that it's a topic that gets kept sneaking up on you. What do you mean by that? Also how come you avoided it though for so long?

Liliana Padilla: Well, I think the play is very much about shame and about the process of undoing shame and it uses humor as one of the many tactics inside of this dismantling. It was a play underneath every other play that I wrote. I think it's a story that my being needed to tell most urgently and yet it was this story that my brain and my fear was most afraid of being perceived as different because of sharing from experiences of assault in myself and in the work.

I let this fear really ride for a long time until one moment when I actually realized it was choking my throat and I actually couldn't write anything until I wrote this story. Until I did that process of liberating the parts of me that wanted to be free and wanted to be seen and wanted to be let go of, actually. The writing process was a tremendously liberatory one.

Tiffany Hanssen: It was the right time for you. Speculate why is it the right time for the rest of us.

Liliana Padilla: It's such a great question. I think it's important to know the play is very much a comedy and I've thought through how people's nervous systems can really receive the play in terms of a balance of humor and movement, as well as going to deeper emotional places. I'd say that the ride of the play is very intentionally crafted to be one that is as accessible as it can be. In terms of the question of why is it the right time for the rest of us? I've thought a lot about this in relationship to the pandemic.

In relationship to a sense of alienation from our own bodies and from one another and how do we begin to reclaim that space between us? How do we begin to really connect to our own bodies, our own desire, and how we can be together in ways that are truly affirming?

Tiffany Hanssen: Steph, when you first read the script, what did you think?

Steph Paul: It's interesting. I can't even connect to what my brain was processing. I can really connect to the activity and the aliveness in my body. I felt really connected to every cell inside of me so much of how I engage with art and with work is through music and movement. I just felt really alive and the fullness of what it means to be alive. I felt a celebration of self. I felt curious about my own desire and my own needs and my own experiences. The act of engaging with the work itself was so much bigger than, "Oh, this is a play."

It really invited me to connect to myself and to my community and to the experiences that we all share. I felt alive.

Tiffany Hanssen: That sounds like a really positive experience.

Steph Paul: Yes, absolutely.

Tiffany Hanssen: About something that's really devastating.

Steph Paul: I think the specificity of the work and being able to be on the page and community with these people that are really coming together to figure out how to make a path forward. I very much think of this play in relation to mutual aid organizations when people just come together and I have this and I have that. Together we will all put this in one pot and we will figure out how to care for ourselves and each other. We can't run from the truth of what this play invites us to look at, but I always, in confronting that pain, am always celebrating community and possibility of how we can move forward.

Tiffany Hanssen: Rachel what jumped out at you when you read it from a director's point of view let's say, put your director's hat on?

Rachel Chavkin: That's the only hat I wear. Actually, these very beautiful hats that Liliana made for our opening night. The play is built like a brick four-letter word house.

Steph Paul: Thank you for saving me that.

[laughter]

Rachel Chavkin: It's so beautifully constructed as both Steph and Liliana have talked about. It's so funny and I love the image that Steph was just talking about of the mutual aid organization because it's really like the-- yes, the play is inspired by a devastating event, and an incredible act of violence, and everyone is a witness to it in some immediate or more distant ways that's on our stage. They are healing and they are healing through each other and through themselves.

That attempt at redemption and being on the periphery of an act of violence and coming together through it as a community, as individuals is just so moving to me. The construction of the piece is just really incredible.

Tiffany Hanssen: For folks who are wondering what we're talking about here, give us just the basic outline of the story of the play. Liliana, do you want to?

Liliana Padilla: Sure. The premise is that before the play begins, Susanna has been raped and two of her sorority sisters, Brandy and Cara, team up to put on this self-defense class. Brandy has a black belt in karate and many other forms of mixed martial arts, and Cara has promotional skills. They think, "Okay, we're going to put this on. This is what we can do." Two freshmen who want to rush the sorority that they're a part of show up and their primary goals are acceptance and figuring themselves out.

A junior who's super quiet, sneaks in, and it's not totally clear why she's there, but she's interested in learning how to defend herself. Then in scene two, two of the guys show up and suddenly the whole class is assembled, which is much smaller than they thought it would be. They start learning self-defense but they also put on a consent workshop. I think the intention of both of those forms meets the reality of lived experience in ways that are both funny and human and also painful and thorny. They have to contend with actually being together.

Tiffany Hanssen: So it's funny. It's a funny play.

Liliana Padilla: Yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: I'm curious how you think about humor as a tool for healing.

Liliana Padilla: I think humor is one of the biggest tools I use in my life. Just quite literally laughter is movement and if something moves, it can heal. If something moves, it can change. Gosh, I just think that laughter and tragedy are never that far apart from one another. What it does in terms of adding, I think humor adds perspective. It does a zoom-out function, but I also think that it connects us in a really profound way. If we can laugh at something or some aspect of ourselves or lived experience, it connects us and it also helps it move into imagining something else.

Tiffany Hanssen: Steph, she's talking about movement. I'm looking at you. How do you translate that movement that she's talking about into physical movement?

Steph Paul: Ooh. Yes, the movement that they're talking about, I think the play that Liliana has written invites-- the whole script moves. It's super rhythmic. It's music on the page, and we have this gift to access movement in a multitude of ways. Movement as armor, movement as a means of protection, movement, as release, movement as the avenue in towards someone's inner light and the life they seek to live. So much of what we did in process in relation to this movement was being actually really in tune to the bodies of the human beings that were acting in the play.

Very much being responsive both to the needs of the actors, the individuals, and responsive simultaneously to the needs of the character. Being really in tune to the middle of that Venn diagram and moving both in relationship to story, but also like walking in. The first thing we would do would be warm up, release, laugh, see each other. Movement was embedded throughout our process.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Rachel, one parallel I drew for myself was-- Have you seen the movie Women Talking?

Rachel Chavkin: I haven't yet, unfortunately.

Tiffany Hanssen: Basically the thing that drew a parallel for me was that in the case of the film, the abuse is never shown in that there's not a rape scene in this.

Rachel Chavkin: No. Correct. Very much no.

Liliana Padilla: [crosstalk] is not depicted.

Tiffany Hanssen: Right. You read it for the first time, what did that do for you? Not seeing it? How did that play for you? Did it take away? Did it add? Was it additive to the experience of these women and men talking?

Rachel Chavkin: Yes. I don't think it's unusual and drama to have a sense of a ghost living on stage in some way. I think that's actually a real hallmark of a lot of place in this country. Sometimes that's a ghost of a family member. That's sometimes literally hanging over the stage in portrait form or other ways. Sometimes that's in the bones of the space that you're living in. I think in this case very, very early on the young woman who has been attacked, Susanna is named.

She is brought into this space in a way that just keeps getting more and more complex and personal over the course of the show for each of the different characters. You really get this sense of a prism almost of how this attack is ringing through the bodies and the minds of each of our characters. I think the idea that the violence happens initially offstage actually makes a ton of sense because it's still felt, it's still alive, and more often than not, it's how many of us experience an act of violence.

Tiffany Hanssen: Right. Liliana, you talked about reconnecting with our bodies and all of that during the pandemic, and I want to get to that. I want to get to this concept of consent. We're going to just take a quick break. We are talking about a play How to Defend Yourself. We're talking with the directors of the play, and we'll come back to more of it here on All Of It in just a minute.

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This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Alison Stewart. We're talking about a new play, How to Defend Yourself, talking with the directors and the playwright for it, How to Defend Yourself. All With us here. Liliana, I said I wanted to get to this concept of consent, but actually, I want to broaden that out a little bit and talk about how you are-- This is based around a very traumatic event, but it touches on other themes, not only of consent but of desire and how we connect with our bodies and each others bodies. How did each of those themes influence you as you're writing this?

Liliana Padilla: Ooh, that's a yummy question.

Tiffany Hanssen: I specialize in yummy questions.

Liliana Padilla: I think as I was avoiding writing the play while also wanting to write the play, I think part of what was in my brain was what are all the depictions of life after sexual assault in media? What are the depictions of survivorship? One thing that felt really absent to my own lived experience was desire and messy desire, and all the contradictions that live inside of even the conversation within our own bodies of what do I want, as simple as what do I want to do today?

As complex as what do I want sexually and what do I want in relationship to another person moment to moment? That always felt like a really dynamic question inside of my own, I'll say healing journey, but I also think human journey. I think it's just a deeply existential question. I think this question of desire is in many ways the fundamental question of the play, which is, how do we connect to our desire and communicate that outwardly?

Tiffany Hanssen: Rachel, if I'm someone who's thinking about coming to this play and I've experienced sexual violence in my life, and I'm saying to myself, I'm not going to laugh at that, what would you say to that person? How can this play help them get there?

Rachel Chavkin: Yes. I was talking with a colleague who expressed actually a very similar concern. She asked does anyone become stronger after the violence because she was not interested in seeing a story where someone becomes a superhero or somehow impermeable following an assault. Immediately I could say to her, well, first and foremost, actually, that character is not on stage. I think importantly, equally to your question is that there is no invitation in any way to laugh or take lightly the assault that precedes this show. That is the horrendous bed from which the characters are rebuilding.

The humor that's to be found is in the day after, the week after the attempt to throw a party, whether that party should be received or not. The attempt to find and build community. The awkwardness of being a 19-year-old. There's just a beautiful. I think it's important to honor our cast, which are all pretty close to the age of these characters. Some of them very much so in their college years, 18 to 22 basically. The vulnerability and humor and awkwardness with which they ride through this story is just delicious and deeply, deeply human and fragile and strange.

There's enormous pleasures to be gotten. I think actually for the person that you're asking about potentially in the audience which I know is on our creative team, which I know is a part of everyone who is in the room with this piece on a really daily basis. The piece calls a lot from each of us. At the same time, I think it's far more nourishing than the idea of simply looking at a tragic event. It's not porn in that way.

Tiffany Hanssen: Steph, this is something that happens to a physical body. There are things that are discussed that happen to the physical body that are also pleasurable. How do those themes of violence and desire and consent translate into movement for you?

Steph Paul: Oh, that is a really interesting question. Whoa, that's interesting that I don't know if I've ever thought of it in that way. I think it starts off piggybacking off of something Leona said. I think the experience of both making the peace and just being in collaboration with this work is it first and foremost invites you to listen to your own body. I think so often for all of us, the body speaks, but we actually ignore. We do not answer the call.

I think first and foremost, to be able to actually connect to what one wants or to what one does not want, you have to actually be in a space in which you are able to listen and to hear yourself and to release. I think the piece invites that release and actually invites that play and that exploration. I think it really starts there. It starts with your own relationship with yourself and what does it mean to actually be in community with yourself? Because it is when you can be in community with your own self and your own body that you can be in community and in relation with others.

Tiffany Hanssen: Liliana, there is no one type of person that we can say is going to come to this play. People are coming with all kinds of history. To try to speculate what you hope someone will take from the play, I realize that it's going to depend on their own lived experience, but just a broad brush. You wrote this because you want people to come away with what?

Liliana Padilla: I think I wrote this first and foremost as a gift to my 17-year-old self who felt deeply alone inside of limiting narratives around what it was to continue living after assault. I wanted to create a narrative that was bigger and wider and had many, many more possibilities for the young person. My hope is that it allows people to connect deeply to parts of themselves that might feel stuck or wounded, and that there's more space and there's more space to have that conversation first and foremost inside of their own body, but also within their communities that maybe the days, weeks, years afterwards have more movement and have more space to move.

Rachel Chavkin: Can I just add on one thing?

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, of course.

Rachel Chavkin: I just want to lift up the multi-generational groups that we've been having. Actually, right now a student matinee is going on, which I can't even imagine what the theater sounds like. I imagine it's delicious. We've been having a lot of parents bring their high school or college-age kids and actually, even--

Steph Paul: Boys and men and women.

Liliana Padilla: All genders.

Rachel Chavkin: Totally. 100%. All gender. Even amongst the three of us, I think we're not so dissimilar in age, but I don't remember hearing the word consent growing up at all.

Tiffany Hanssen: I didn't either.

Liliana Padilla: There you go.

Steph Paul: Absolutely not.

Rachel Chavkin: All of our actors certainly were like, "Oh yes, we know this, we recognize this." I just wanted to lift that up because it's been a really delicious part of the production has been watching different generations, including generations that have come together, receive the show.

Tiffany Hanssen: Wonderful.

Liliana Padilla: May I add one thing? Yes. I just want to add that at a performance woman in her 70s came up to me and she said, "I saw myself at different stages of my life in every single character in this play," which I thought was so beautiful.

Tiffany Hanssen: That has to feel good. All right. The play is How to Defend Yourself. It's running at New York Theater Workshop through April 2nd. Also if you are under 25 or over 65, speaking of these multi-generational groups or an artist or a resident of the East Village in the lower East side, you can snag a $25 seat via our cheap ticks rush at any performance. This is what I'm told. Does that all sound accurate? Good. Thumbs up. Steph Paul is a director, choreographer, and creative who worked, in addition to also being the co-director on the show, worked on the movement as well.

Rachel Chavkin is also a co-director. Liliana Padilla is the playwright and co-director. Thank you all so much for being here.

Liliana Padilla: Thank you.

Rachel Chavkin: Thank you.

Steph Paul: Thank you so much for having us.

 

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