I went to see a terrifying play last night – Extremities:
Set in present-day, Extremities is every woman’s worst nightmare come true… with a twist. During an attempted rape, a woman captures her attacker and proceeds to torture him. Her roommates return home and struggle to determine who is guilty of a crime, the woman or her would-be rapist.
It’s a benefit for SFWAR – San Francisco Women Against Rape and it runs through this weekend. It’s the kind of play that makes you really uncomfortable but you’re super glad you saw it.
Sounds like a similar premise to Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, a play (and later movie) set in Chile, where a woman takes in a stranded motorist during a storm only to suspect/realise (depending on interpretation) that he is the doctor who raped and tortured her years and years earlier. She tortures him, and there’s a similar moral question as in the play you saw. It really brings out the horror of it, and the production I saw of the play was awesome.
My freshman year in college, one of the theatre groups put on Extremities with the two best actors on campus in the lead roles. It was weird, because they were good friends and everyone knew them, and then they gave these incredible performances. I worked with the director of the piece on Sister Mary Ignatius the following semester (she played Sister Mary, I directed) and she taught me how to work through difficult scenes like that with actors. Just before I started work on that show, a friend told me that she had been raped by a relative. I’ve been working on sexual violence in various theatre projects ever since.
Right on Notorious! I’ve definitely been doing this work for a long time too and i’m soooo glad to see others out there working on this issue.