During a time when roughly half the population is comprised of women, one would have the impression that the two sexes could coexist in equal standing, gender simply being a category of character and not treatment.
But this is not the case.
“REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN.,” a play that opened Friday at the Boston Center for the Arts, highlighted expressions against a patriarchal society. After all, women face constant oppression and are placed second rate to men across several disciplines, trans-historically and across the globe, according to Carrie Preston, a Boston University professor and the director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.
“Different ways of solving the problem have been suggested by different groups of feminism,” Preston said. “You have liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist or Marxist feminism. They offer different explanations for the oppression of women and different suggestions on how to resolve it.”
Attempts have been made to right the wrongs of inequality in society, or at the very least bring the issue of inequality to attention.
Written by English playwright Alice Birch and directed by Company One’s Director of Public Relations Summer Williams, the play, “REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN.” was created expressly for that purpose. “REVOLT” effectively and emotively “seeks to unearth the internalized prejudices against femininity and womanhood and turn them towards the light,” said Shawn LaCount, a co-founder and artistic director of Company One.
The cast and crew began rehearsing the show in mid-September, but Williams said she had been thinking about directing the play long before that. The complexity of the play proved to be a challenge for her, she said, as she had several elements to determine when transferring the script to stage.
“On the page, the play doesn’t have any characters, so there are just lines,” Williams said. “That was an interesting journey, since most plays aren’t packaged like that.”
Since a lot of the play was open to interpretation, Williams went in with a one-track mind to tame the intricate nature of the show. She said she had the intentions of directing the play in such a way that all women could connect to its themes on a personal level.
“For me, it was really important that all kinds of women could feel like they were represented in that space,” Williams said.
Though the play emphasized the power of feminism, Williams wanted to ensure it also explained what it means to be a woman, including how everything affects women, she said.
“I felt really conscious of figuring out what are some things that we can wrap around that idea that makes it feel like it’s not just seen through the lens of white feminism, but through a lens of women as a whole,” Williams said.
Williams said she had the audience’s receptiveness in mind when considering how she wanted to present “REVOLT,” but not in the typical way of clarifying and objectifying the play’s message. She wanted more. She wanted her audience to leave the theater with even more questions than they came with, she said, hopefully further motivating them to find their own answers themselves.
The show wasn’t about answering questions, Williams said.
“It’s about creating an experience for everyone to feel something,” she said, “and hopefully be moved and inspired to think about how gender expectations affect their world and what they want to do about that.”
Grace Trapnell, an actor with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company who attended the show, thrived in this idea, as she said she believed she would continue to wrap her head around the show’s message for a good while.
“It’s all about breaking the mold and crushing the patriarchy, if you will,” Trapnell said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be like your typical linear sort of piece, not plot-driven.”
But although the structure initially proved to be a challenge, Williams said that she wouldn’t have it any other way. If “REVOLT” were written in a clear, straightforward manner, she said she believed that it would not have represented its themes and ideas nearly as effectively as its complicated form.
“It would not be nearly as complicated as women are,” she said. “It would not be nearly as complicated as the world is. I think those complications are very real. It’s messy. It’s ugly. It’s real. It’s all those things. It has to be.”