Feminist Freaky Friday Rapture, Blister, Burn
OHthe road not taken. What were your dreams as a twenty-something? What did you want for your life and who did you love? Maybe things didn’t work out as planned. Maybe you settled for less than you wanted — and you don’t know why. If you could get a do-over, would you take it?
In Rapture, Blister, Burn, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play — presented by New Mexico Actors Lab and opening with a preview performance on Thursday, June 7 — three old college friends get a second chance in the form of a collective midlife crisis. There is Catherine (Leslie Fleming-Mitchell), the successful writer and public intellectual; her former roommate Gwen (Vanessa Rios y Valles); and Don (David Christian Welborn), Gwen’s husband, who used to be Catherine’s boyfriend. Also in the mix are Catherine’s mother, Alice (Ann Roylance), who has recently suffered a heart attack, and Avery (Madeleine Garcia), a college student who babysits for Don and Gwen. Catherine has come to town to care for her mother and quickly agrees to teach a summer-school seminar, through the university where Don is a dean, on feminism, media, and degradation. Her students are Gwen and Avery — and, by default, her mother.
The classroom is Alice’s house, where the four women gather weekly to deconstruct various topics, such as privacy, reality television, slasher films, and theorists like Phyllis Schlafly and Betty Friedan. Alice doesn’t understand the younger generation’s aversion to Schlafly, whom she conflates with another outspoken conservative figure, Anita Bryant. Catherine wants her mother’s perspective because she lived through second-wave feminism as a young woman. Bryant was the beauty queen who advertised orange juice and opposed equality for gay people, she explains, while Schlafly opposed equality for women. “She believed that an Equal Rights Amendment would be the end of marriage. And the end of marriage would be the end of civilization.”
“I wasn’t really aware,” Alice says of her understanding of all this at the time. “I know that’s terrible. I was just very wrapped up in my little baby … I only had eyes for her.”
Rapture, Blister, Burn is not a feminist play, said Robert Benedetti, founder and artistic director of New Mexico Actors Lab, who directs this production. “It is a play about feminist issues. Each member of the cast has a deeply personal issue aroused, and there are relationship tangles within the structure of the play that act out or embody the feminist issues — most importantly, the issue of co-dependency and dominance in male-female relationships. I don’t like preachy plays, and I think this play raises more questions than it answers; it explores issues rather than taking sides.”
A few themes threaded throughout the play are grounded in the title, which is a line lifted from “Use Once & Destroy,” a song by the grunge-punk band Hole, from the 1998 album Celebrity Skin. (The album title refers to a pornographic magazine.) “I went down for the remains,” Courtney Love sings, “Sort through all your blurs and stains/Take your rapture blister burns/Stand in line it’s not your turn/All dressed in red, always the bride/Off with her head, all dressed in white/Off with her head.” The song lyrics describe internal emptiness and the search for fulfillment, as well as a deep, simmering rage. They can be interpreted to be about addiction, grief, or any kind of extended gut-wrenching sadness that forces you to examine where life has taken you.
Catherine and Gwen engage in a kind of non-fantastical Freaky Friday narrative, in which they attempt to see if they can reconfigure the present by slipping into the life not lived.
Love — always a controversial and polarizing figure — certainly knows these states of mind quite intimately. But the singer is also thematically important to the play, because her fame rose just as a quiet time in mainstream feminism was percolating into the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s. Millennial women like Avery cut their teeth on Hole’s music. As members of Generation X, Gwen and Catherine, however ambitious they might have been or continue to be, still mainly grew up understanding feminism as a movement that advocates competing with men for career and economic stature — but on men’s terms. Avery finds this outlook boring, and wants to ask more fundamental questions about the nature of patriarchy — even as the choices she makes in her dating life put her on shaky ground when it comes to demanding some level of emotional trust and romantic commitment from men.
In the other half of the plot, Catherine and Gwen engage in a kind of non-fantastical Freaky Friday narrative, in which they attempt to see if they can reconfigure the present by slipping into the life not lived. Don is stuck in the middle, which is an apt metaphor for his character in general. His intellect was never stimulated by Gwen the way it was by Catherine, so he never pursued a meaningful academic career. He got married and had kids instead.
“Don found a drinking buddy in Catherine’s roommate when Catherine rejected him to go to London on a fellowship,” Welborn said. “He gave up. Gwen gave up. They try to get it back later in life, only to realize that they are who they are.”
“My character says throughout the play that she detests Schlafly, but that lately she thinks she’s got a few points. I think Catherine is punishing herself for being an over-achiever who has to do it all and have it all,” FlemingMitchell said. She added that on a personal level, she was worried that she’d be giving undue attention to Schlafly’s ideas by talking about her in the play. “But we also talk about other people’s ideas. I’d like to believe feminism evolves as we discover more. One or two waves were never going to be enough.”
“And it should never end,” Welborn said. “The waves will keep coming, because things get better for women and then they get worse. And then better. And then worse again. And then better.”
“Trump represents a giant step backward for women,” Benedetti said. The octogenarian director said that he has learned so much throughout the rehearsal process. For instance, he initially thought Avery’s character represented a kind of post-feminism, until he learned that a fourth wave of feminism — which blossomed on social media and concerns itself with racial justice and rape culture, among other issues — now exists.
“More and more about the way women are treated gets revealed, and it’s horrific,” Fleming-Mitchell said, referring to the #MeToo movement and all that it has uncovered. “We’ve been living this, and it was so much the fabric of our society that we didn’t see it. We didn’t pull the individual threads. Now we’re taking apart the fabric and looking at what it’s made of. I plan to be a seventh-wave feminist, if that’s needed.”