I remember this event being fairly well-attended in previous years, with many of the shows selling out. Yesterday's performance yielded an audience of only 119 attendees in a 700-seat auditorium. I wondered if the low turnout was at least in part due to the difficulty of marketing an event with such a generic and literal title--"Our Monologues". There is virtually no stir or buzz created by such an event title. "Vagina Monologues", by contrast, is a much catchier title due to its provocative nature and its explicit feature of an inappropriate-for-dinner-table-conversation subject. Furthermore, the idea of a monologue emerging from a vagina indicates the event title is not to be taken literally. This in turn generates curiosity, mystery, amusement, and a whole host of other emotions that might compel students to attend the event. Plus, marketing an event is much easier if the hook you use to catch people's attention is, "Hey, do you like vaginas?"
A head-scratching production decision that the group made this year was to project speakers' scripts on the screen behind the stage. (I wondered if this was an attempt to combat "ableism"--deaf attendees may not have otherwise been able to experience the material, and an ASL interpreter would likely have been prohibitively expensive for the student group.) Not only were speakers' scripts shown on the screen, but the emcee's lines were also displayed. This effectively killed any of the "jokes" that the emcee made. The audience could anticipate the jokes by reading ahead. And, if the jokes are scripted, then your delivery had better be masterful; unfortunately, the emcee's was not. The display of the emcee's lines also seemed to discount the praise that the emcee gave to performers; for instance, "Your story is inspiring," or, "We are so proud of you," rings somewhat hollow when the feedback was written in advance and the text is right there for everyone to read.
Another disadvantage of projecting the script on the screen is that speakers could use it as a crutch. Embarrassingly, several speakers who clearly had not rehearsed enough** had to turn around in the middle of their monologues to read their lines...for their own monologues that they wrote about themselves. My theory is that in general, it may be easier to memorize a script that someone else has written. Memorizing a retelling of your own story could be difficult because you may tell it so many times, and each time you tell it, you use different words. Essentially, the speakers memorized and recited one specific iteration of their narrative at this event. Each time you tell the story, some details may not seem as important, and others may rise to the forefront. Perhaps these particular monologues were a microcosm of this phenomenon, resulting in the speakers having difficulty recalling what they wrote.
If nothing else, the words projected on the screen were distracting. It added another sensory input for the audience to consume. I was unable to fully engage with the speakers' delivery because I focused on reading the text. I could not experience the emotions they hoped to conjure in me. And, if the speaker deviated from what was on the screen (which they often did, sometimes by only a word or two), that caused me a delay in engaging with the content because my brain was busy identifying and making sense of the discrepancy.
Another feature of this year's event was the creation of a "safe space" in the lobby of the auditorium. Attendees were encouraged to practice self-care--"however that looks to you"--including stepping out and making use of the safe space if the content became too much for them. (Surprisingly, the word "trigger" was not used.) The safe space in the lobby consisted of a blanket on the floor with pillows and a teddy bear as well as a table with various activities on it, including coloring pages, play dough, and 24-piece puzzles.
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| The "safe space" in the lobby |
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| The activity table within the safe space |
There are some secondary problems with the safe space's design as well. First, why should a safe space be needed when the attendees voluntarily paid money to come to the event? Would they not have already accepted the risk that the content could be upsetting? Second, are teddy bears, coloring books, play dough, and puzzles items that are universally associated with childhood, or do they conjure a white, American, middle-class experience of childhood? Third, there seems to be an assumption that the items in the safe space are indisputably comforting. Is there a chance that attendees could be triggered by those items, perhaps if they were sexually abused as toddlers or young children?
No one used the safe space.
Before the first speaker began, the emcee declared, "White men: this is not your space," and then proceeded to deliver a backhanded unilateral denunciation of white men. If the event's focus was on womanhood, then why were white men specifically admonished? What about black, Asian, trans, or cis men? (This question became even more relevant when after the first speaker, the emcee said, "So what I'm getting from [speaker]'s monologue is: men suck!"--not just white men, but all men.) Furthermore, this declaration directly contradicts the decision to change the event title from "Vagina Monologues" to "Our Monologues"; that is, it contradicts the mantra of wider inclusion and nuance of individual experiences within communities. In general, the ultra-leftist narrative is that white men are pure evil and are greedy for dominion over every space they occupy. Consequently, white men are immediately vilified and have their experiences and opinions discounted simply due to the intersection of their skin color and gender identity. Nuance is granted to individuals within all communities except for white men.
What risk were the organizers attempting to mitigate by denouncing white men? Were they afraid that a white man would stand up during a performance and go on a rant? Or could they not conceive of the notion that maybe some white men wanted to attend to learn from the women speakers?
I think the conclusion that I've arrived at is that I've grown out of the Berkeley hyper-liberal shell that I might have occupied at some point in the past. Although this shell that many students don does seem to become tighter and tighter every year as the volume inside the echo chamber reaches deafening levels.
* Hot take: In my experience, at ultra-leftist events such as this when speakers talk about their experiences, it frequently devolves into a pissing contest of who has the most trauma or who can present themselves as the most marginalized. (Footnote on a footnote: Another example of this sometimes happens at political rallies or protests; speakers declare that they are an immigrant or the child of immigrant parents, and then insert a pause in their speech, which frequently manages to be filled with applause and cheers. Somehow, the quality of simply not being from here is a virtue in itself.)
** The event began with an brief video screening featuring the three event organizers. As the organizers spoke in the video, their eyes frequently darted away from the camera, clearly to read the off-screen script. That they were reading a script also created awkward pauses and inflections in the delivery. Did the organizers just go with their first take? Would it have been too much to ask that they rehearse more?
