Rewriting the Rules of Engagement

When frustrated by computer technology, one of the hardest lessons to learn when is that, when push comes to shove, it's okay to reboot the computer without taking the prescribed steps to "power down." If need be, one can even pull the plug to disconnect the computer from its electrical source. Similarly, when playing a video game, pressing the reset button will not bring about the end of the world as we know it.

So what's the big deal? Some view such frenzied moves as last-ditch attempts to rescue a tense situation from disaster. Others label such desperate actions with curious nicknames like a "Hail, Mary pass," "the last resort," or "moving the goalposts." For some people, the act of disruption (threatening the status quo) is difficult to comprehend. Many are hesitant to defy long-established rules of order for a game, a government, or a society. However, when desperate measures must be taken, disruption can deliver surprising results.




By refusing to follow the standard script, the brave students who survived the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida have pre-emptively used language to seize control of the gun control debate. In her article entitled “They Were Trained for This Moment,” legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick stresses that:

“Despite the gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts, civics, and enrichment are zeroed out. In no small part because the school is more affluent than its counterparts across the country, these kids have managed to score the kind of extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United States.”

“Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a ‘system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.’ Unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education (that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings) creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.”

Scott Maxwell's OpEd piece in the Orlando Sentinel entitled "Parkland Shooting Has Changed Politics-As-Usual in Florida" points to three other factors that had a strong effect on legislators in Tallahassee:

• The shooting occurred during a legislative session.
• The shooting occurred during an election year in which Florida's Governor Rick Scott is launching a campaign for the United States Senate.
• The murdered students looked an awful lot like the teenage children of many politicians.

Perhaps it would help to view the power of vocabulary through the satirical lens of Filipe Dimas in his piece entitled "Most Popular Kink Among Millennials is Role-Playing as a Couple That Owns a House" (recently published in The Beaverton). Or Alexandra Petri's snort-a-licious piece in The Washington Post entitled "I Thought International Women’s Day Was Meaningless Until I Saw a Pink Hat on the Washington Monument." Or listening to this vocabulary-driven novelty song from 1964's Bajour.

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Several weeks ago I found myself at a surprising loss for words. Or rather, at a loss for an extremely particular word. As I started to write a review of Bamboozled (Patricia Milton's new comedy in which four scheming women continually try to outmaneuver each other), I wondered what word could be used as the female equivalent of cockblocking during such tense times as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. The obvious solution would have been to substitute a widely-known pejorative term for the female anatomy in place of the first syllable. But, as Sir John Falstaff once warned, "Discretion is the better part of valor."

Thankfully, Crowded Fire Theatre came to the rescue by presenting the Bay area premiere of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Alice Birch's scorching 2013 play starts off gently teasing its audience by showing how (a) men don't really listen to the women in their lives, (b) one of the biggest problems we face in relationships is a consistent failure to communicate, and (c) the only way to assert one's power in a charged situation is to keep asserting it. Just as resistance breeds persistence, so does persistence breed resistance.

In today's highly charged media (thanks to Donald Trump's toxic masculinity and "transactional" approach to life), words are easily weaponized. Assuming that the world is basically "a boy's club," "a man's world," or that men are entitled to a wide variety of privileges purely on the basis of their gender, many men believe that what they want is all that matters.


Alas, that kind of thinking isn't working quite as well as it used to. In her program note, dramaturg Maddie Gaw writes:

“The power that language has to shape our perceptions makes it incredibly difficult to even imagine, let alone to convey, how to operate outside of the patriarchy. Using gendered language subtly shapes who people imagine taking on certain roles (I’ve worked at theatres that described a project as a ‘two-man job’). The language Birch uses is highly specific, but who gets to use that language is highly flexible. Almost no dialogue is prescribed to a character and there is no set casting. Our creative team was given the freedom to imagine what it was like if anyone could say anything."

"In making this discovery about Birch’s writing, we realized we needed to approach the script like devised theater. This meant that the final product was essentially ‘co-written’ by everyone from the actors to the designers in a democratic fashion. Birch’s ferocious manifesto about how the world is set up to beat down women in every aspect of life offers one ingenious solution to that problem. While it was exhilarating to work with the freedom that she provided us, it was not as if the play’s language was suddenly free from its societal context. My job as the dramaturg has been to carefully consider this language and how we are using it. I pushed the whole team to consider who was getting what lines, and what stories our choices were telling.”

In the first three scenes of Birch's play, she starts to strip away basic assumptions of privilege and entitlement that many men take for granted with regard to foreplay, relationships, and corporate life. What becomes painfully obvious is that many men simply don't know how to listen. In their cluelessness, they seem hard-wired to only think about what they want to say next.

The first scene shows a man (Soren Santos) and woman (Elissa Beth Stebbins) teasing each other prior to having sex. The more the man tries to fall back on romantic clichés ("I brought you flowers") and assumptions about who will dominate the action, the more the woman decides to take matters into her own hands. Defiantly reversing the power structure that many men assume will trigger a successful seduction that culminates in a "happy ending," the woman announces that her vagina is taking charge and "I need you take your hand out of my body so I can put my fist in yours!" In a demonstration of what can happen during carpe diem sex, the man ends up being increasingly confused and flustered by his sudden loss of power.

Soren Santos and Elissa Beth Stebbins discover that words gain new
power when spoken by someone of the opposite gender in a scene
from Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

The second scene shows a man (Soren Santos) struggling to propose to a woman (Leigh Rondon-Davis) who is less than excited by the thought of marrying him. With his canned protestations of how much she means to him and each recollection about what he's told her in the past, the woman (who is apparently a much better listener) calmly replies "That's not what you said." As the man becomes increasingly flabbergasted that things are not going his way, he nervously blurts out that he wants to marry the woman so that he'll have the security of knowing that she will always be there for him.

In the third scene, a female executive (Karla Acosta) tells her boss (Gabriel Christian) that she wants to stop working on Mondays because she's tired and would prefer to spend that time walking her two pit bulls in the potato fields near the house she just inherited. Whether or not she is working at a startup company, her boss is clearly unable to grasp what she has said in words that a four-year-old child could understand.

Karla Acosta wants Mondays off while Gabriel Christian wants to
install office vending machines for chocolate in a scene from
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

Each time the woman refuses to budge from her position, the man keeps trying to come up with additional perks and benefits he thinks might appeal to a female. As he gets increasingly excited about each idea (extra classes! wine! vending machines with chocolate!) he bounces with greater vigor on his exercise ball like an excited toddler. As hilarious as this scene may be, it reinforces the old adage that, if you want power, you can't wait for the powers that be to give it to you. Sometimes you have to seize it on your own terms.

As each scene transitions to the next, an imposing wall of patriarchal assumptions (created by Justine Law with large blocks of styrofoam) starts to come apart. First one block moves out of alignment. Then another gets pushed out of the wall, leaving a gaping hole in its place. Eventually, angry women start tearing the wall down and throwing the styrofoam blocks (as well as some pieces of watermelon) at the men below.

In one scene, Cat Luedtke portrays a woman who doesn't recognize her estranged daughter (Elissa Beth Stebbins) or her granddaughter (Karla Acosta). The daughter keeps trying to explain that she understands that her mother was raped and horribly abused by the man who is her biological father. However, the reason for her visit is because she needs her sick child to know that there is good in the world. Luedtke's character is not the least bit interested in solving someone else's problem.

Cat Luedtke takes a cigarette break in a scene from
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

In another scene, Stebbins keeps tap dancing as fast as she can while the men onstage aren't required to make any effort to get what they want. A subsequent scene depicts male straphangers on buses and trains who think that their supposedly unconscious "trespassing" of a woman's space is merely an innocent game. As a group of rebellious, "nasty women" fight to claim power over their own lives, they eventually embrace a shocking manifesto which declares that "We have to kill all the men. We may feel sad about it. We may not. But that's what needs to be done if we will ever be able to redefine the world in which we live."

Cat Luedtke, Elissa Beth Stebbins, Leigh Rondon-Davis, and
Karla Acosta in a scene from Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
(Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

With costumes by Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, lighting by Dylan Feldman, and sound design by Cliff Caruthers, Birch's play has been forcefully directed by Crowded Fire Theatre's founding artistic director, Rebecca Novick, who does a fine job of shaping the dark humor and seething anger that has always driven the battle of the sexes. The six-actor ensemble (Karla Acosta, Gabriel Christian, Cat Luedtke, Leigh Rondon-Davis, Soren Santos, and Elissa Beth Stebbins) does a splendid job of explaining why such movements as #MeToo and #NeverthelessShePersisted will refuse to "go gently into the night."

Performances of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. continue through March 24 at the Potrero Stage (click here for tickets).

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If, after more than a year of having to cope with the unending cruelty and mendacity of the Trump administration, you feel an aching need to step away from social media and enjoy some peace and quiet, let me offer two suggestions. One is to read technology columnist Farhad Manjoo's recent article entitled "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned." The other would be to set aside 90 minutes to watch the visually rich new documentary directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer entitled Leaning Into The Wind.


Composer Fred Frith and Riedelsheimer worked together on 2001's Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the British environmentalist and site-specific artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who finds most of his inspiration in nature and uses the materials he finds in forests and on beaches for his art. The two men have teamed up again to examine where Goldsworthy stands today as an older man, a father, and an artist who is not obsessed with making sure that his work leaves a mark on the world.


As the camera follows Goldsworthy through a forest, many parts of the film are wordless, buoyed solely by Frith's gentle, seductive score (a mellow combination of jazz with the sounds of gurgling brooks, bird calls, and the wind rushing through trees and bushes). There are also segments which show the artist working with huge pieces of machinery to bring his vision to life for an installation at San Francisco's Presidio. In a world filled with far too much noise, Leaning Into The Wind is a refreshingly gentle film which often feels like a private meditation on art, life, form, light, and impermanence. As Riedelsheimer explains:

"In 2011, during a shoot in Scotland, I met Andy Goldsworthy again. It had been ten years since we released Rivers and Tides and we had not seen each other in the interim. From the very first moment I felt like no time has passed at all; it felt as though we had just waved farewell a few days before. It felt intimate immediately and I became aware of my never-ending interest in this man and his work. People who know Rivers and Tides think they know Andy Goldsworthy, and so we both felt that adding a new perspective to him and his work would be fascinating. It has been a great time, an unforgettable experience. Leaning Into The Wind offers viewers a different angle, a different perspective, another perception on many levels. It is not only an expansion of the former film but stands by itself. Another moment in time, of Andy´s life -- and of my life."