How to Defend Yourself (Lilana Padilla)
What do we want? How do we want it? How do we communicate that? Those are the questions at the heart of this new play. Written with confidence and skill the play is brimming with evocative and realistic language that exposes the characters in interesting ways. Nothing is didactic and the play moves along at a brisk pace. It sparkles with anger and with humor. And I don’t respond to it, but I don’t know why.
At one point my friend Dennis said that plays are essentially indescribable because if the point of them could be made explicit they wouldn’t be plays. They’d be another medium, or perhaps they wouldn’t be art at all. I don’t entirely agree with that, but I have a feeling that author Lilana Padilla may.
The play takes place in the aftermath of a campus attack on a sorority sister. A senior trained in karate takes it upon herself to start a defense class for the women on campus and we follow the class as they learn and share.
The first flare-ups of conflict happen on the second day when the leader Brandi brings two boys in the classroom space (without knowledge of the students) and when other senior Kara’s inability to verbalize what she wants (and intense desire for rough sex) makes Brandi nervous. We learn that both of the boys (Andy and Eggo) are game to help, but that Eggo is frustrated with uncertain norms about what he should do with sex; feeling like what women want and what they say they want is different and incompatible.
Over the a swift two hours we see the contradictions at play in modern collegiate dating life, we see people lie to preserve themselves, and sadly we see the techniques meant to make these women stronger aren’t panaceas that work automatically: at the end of the play one of the young participants gets attacked and there’s a gulf between what she thinks she knows and what she’s able to accomplish which results in her lashing out at Brandi.
But why am I not filled with this play? It picks at a lot of threads but doesn’t resolve them satisfactorily. In the penultimate scenes Padilla is still pulling out new ideas and conflicts, things which can’t be resolved. Early in the show this habit is exciting, it prompts plenty of interesting questions, but as the play nears its end that excitement turns to anxiety: surely we’re almost at the end, how will these questions be answered?
They’re not. We’re left, like Brandi, confused and disappointed, with little closure. Perhaps that is what it is meant to convey, but for me it is not a satisfactory experience and I want to know what happens between Mojdeh and Diana, do Brandi and Kara work things out, does Nikki return? I’ll never know.
There’s one final bit of transcendence which I wouldn’t talk about except that maybe it holds the key to understanding the play somewhere in the folds of its strangeness. I swear some writing teacher out there is telling playwrights that there needs to be an out-of-body experience in every play, something which sets it apart from cinema, something which can only be done in the intimacy and unreality of the stage; and I’m sick of it.
Whether it’s an opera at the end of Mr. Burns, or Pip turning into a bird in How to Transcend an Unhappy Marriage, or a fever dream of an 1800s pirate ship in the otherwise modern and normal India Pale Ale we are treated to more and more sequences out of step with the story that’s come before existing to give the audience spectacle under the guise of imparting character information. It’s the modern equivalent of a dream ballet, but a dream ballet rarely pretends to be anything else.
In the final moments of How to Defend Yourself as Brandi stammers excuses as to why people show press on despite Nikki’s failure to do what the title suggests we are whisked backwards in time to parties: high school parties, middle school parties, and finally a six year-old’s party where the woman whose attack started the whole show, whom we haven’t seen until now, is a child blowing out her birthday candles.
How does this teach us about communication? Or what we want? Or treat on the difficulty of finding a balance in consent and sex where some partners like the surprise or the feel of danger? What does it treat on at all? I honestly don’t know and am not prepared to think about it any longer.
As a Producer
Despite what I’ve said above this might make a good Pronoia show. It’d likely fit better into the Rec Room’s oeuvre, but the humor, the outlook, and the fun of the show (as difficult as it is) do tick the invisible boxes of what I’m looking for. The show likely wouldn’t get chosen because it requires a skill set our main company doesn’t possess (fight training,) but I’d like to think I could write something like this one day.
