"Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again." at Crowded Fire Theater

Crowded Fire photo by Alessandra Mello

I've been meaning to go to a show at Crowded Fire Theater for some time now, but it kept not quite making it to the top of my list. The Artistic Director, Mina Morita, is a friend and has some really great ideas about theater, so I've been really wanting to see what it's turning into.

This is Crowded Fire's twentieth anniversary season (a season they have dubbed their "Fuck the Patriarchy" season). It starts with a production of Alice Birch's play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. The title sort of tells you what to expect. Sort of.

The Play

The play starts off sort of normal enough, with a sketch about a couple coming home and discussing their plans for the evening. It quickly slides into a series of little digressions on the nuances of language and how they affect expectations and/or serve as microaggressions. Communication on a seemingly innocuous level turns out to be extremely problematic. Just for example, the distinction between "making love to" and "making love with" someone is a part of the discussion.

OK, a step back. This play was prompted by the Royal Shakespeare Company asking four women to write plays in response to the statement that "well-behaved women seldom make history." Birch got quite angry about the "well-behaved" bit and set out on a three-day writing binge with no sleep, and the result was kind of an illustration of women refusing to behave, revolting against love, work, relationships, family, social structure and conventions...you name it. The revolutions just keep on coming.

The play is a series of loosely-related scenes, all of which start off relatively normally, but none end up where you (or the participants) expect. Such is the nature of revolution.

So we see things like a manager talking to an employee who has informed him she won't work on Mondays anymore, and he keeps plugging along, trying to mollify her, when really there is nothing he can do. She just wants to sleep more and walk her dog through the woods. His exasperation becomes quite visible, particularly since he is sitting on an exercise ball throughout.

Or we get two flabbergasted grocery clerks trying to deal with a customer who has removed her clothing and is making something of a mess in one of the store aisles. They keep trying to frame it as a customer behavior issue, and she's having none of it--it's all about her boundaries (or the intentional lack thereof).

In all the scenes, women maintain control, and it drives the folks around them rather nutty. And all the while the structure in the background (a big wall of blocks) keeps coming down, in a vivid metaphor. And watermelons don't get treated very well throughout.

Eventually the play itself kind of spirals out of control. I sort of picture the playwright coming to the end of her 72-hour marathon, losing steam and coherence, and indeed, the play becomes a bit mystifying after a while. But that's kind of satisfying. A revolution that ends in a predictable, tidy outcome isn't much of a revolution at all.

The Performance

It's a bit hard to evaluate this show on the terms that one normally does with a play. Being a set of vignettes and little disconnected scenes, one can't really evaluate actors and their characters on the whole. The ensemble cast (Karla Acosta, Gabriel Christian, Cat Leudtke, Leigh Rondon-Davis, Soren Santos, and Elissa Beth Stebbins) all do great jobs, individually and collectively. Stebbins and Santos set the scene with the opening bit about the couple coming home. And as the chaise longue they've been hopping on and off of gets carried off, we see revolutionary graffiti on the underside.

Indeed, everything that turns over turns out to have yet another exhortation to revolt against something, to the point that it almost loses its effectiveness. Ultimately, I suppose, an ongoing revolution stops feeling "revolutionary" and just becomes the new norm. But things sure get messy along the way.

Some of the mess is quite literal. As Stebbins grills her estranged mother (Leudtke) about her past, the mother refuses to answer, and ultimately seals the deal with a decidedly bloody act. A later scene where a police investigator is literally dancing around the issue of whether he believes a sexual assault has taken place, the victim breaks a packet of stage blood in the crotch of her jeans, and in a #MeToo moment is joined by all the other women on stage, who finish the show all dripping blood.

There's a huge range of moments among the scenes, ranging from humorous to bizarre to extremely touching. A nearby audience member was sobbing through a couple of scenes; clearly she could identify with some of these women who needed to revolt.

Bottom Line

As a man, I feel supremely unqualified to judge the effectiveness of this show. I enjoyed parts and was moved by much of it, and certainly felt the repeated need expressed throughout the show to revolt against convention. So it definitely makes a statement. How effective it is, I have a hard time saying. Much of the time I felt like we were the choir being preached to, but there were certainly issues raised that I hadn't really considered before, so in that sense I suppose it works for me.

I still think as it devolves toward the end, it gets a bit heavy-handed and incoherent. And some of that, at least, is obviously intentional. I'm just not sure how effective it is.

But it's interesting and different, and as long as you don't mind some violent portrayals and a lot of blood and watermelon mayhem, it's a good show. I will definitely have to come back and see what else Crowded Fire has in store for the patriarchy this season.

Revolt runs through the coming weekend, so four more performances.