I'm having very mixed feelings about The Playwright's Realm production "The Rape of the Sabine Women, By Grace B. Matthias" at the Duke. My first reservation is that it is a play about rape told from a woman's point of view by a man, playwright Michael Yates Crowley (no, it was not written by Grace B. Matthias ,who is in point of fact the actual teenage victim of the rape in the play). Now, I'm not saying that a man shouldn't have the right to tell a story from a woman's point of view but it's hard to image how a feminist audience will take to a man presuming that he knows whereof he speaks/writes when it comes to rape.
What is missing from the play is the actual rape. We see the events leading up to it but not the actual rape so we are, in effect, left to figure out for ourselves what the circumstances of the rape actually are. It's a bit muddy. Yes, it's described but that's not enough. We are left to wonder which I think is opening the door to misinterpretation. Would a woman have told the story differently? Yes, I think so, because a woman, especially one who has been a victim of rape herself, would know that it needed to be shown not told. And although Grace appears in a state of semi-shock throughout the play it's unclear whether this was her state before the rape or because of the rape. We don't really get a real sense of how the rape itself has affected her except for her fascination with firemen and the desire to become one in order to put out fires. I get the heavy-handed metaphor but am not sure if it is entirely appropriate. She doesn't display anger or pain beyond shock. She even believes that she will marry one of her rapists. Her rapists are high school football stars on whom the hopes and dreams of the community hangs and so her story is pushed under the carpet because it upsets a balance. But theirs is only a gentle negation of what has happened to her. In reality, wouldn't she have been ostracized by this same community?
The most interesting aspect of the play is the use of a painting of The Rape of the Sabine Women that Grace and her classmates are studying in school and how the characters from the painting come alive embodied by Grace's classmates, including her rapists. The best line in the play is uttered by the raped Sabine woman who married her rapist when she says to Grace, "But you have no cattle. Why would he marry you?"
All in all, the ensemble acting is well done as is the direction by Tyne Rafaeli. But this production doesn't have the power and scope of The Playwright's Realm recent production of "The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe which is being revived at Lincoln Center this fall which addresses some of the same issues and in which Susannah Perkins who plays Grace has a much more developed role. Go see that instead.
