A plot to knock Gandhi off his pedestal
For a theatrical portrait of feminist battle lines, it’d be hard to find one more of-the-moment than “#GetGandhi.” If your social media feeds range from progressive to anarchist, if your circles debate topics like whether it’s worth the emotional labor to try to educate uncomprehending men about why something that’s clearly sexist or abusive is in fact sexist or abusive, you’ll feel eerily at home watching Anne Galjour’s play, seen Sunday, Aug. 12, at Z Below.
The world premiere from the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits Theatre Collective (which Galjour in her curtain speech described as “a brandnew, scrappy, postmenopausal” theater company) follows a group of women who want to knock Gandhi off his pedestal — literally.
As part of Gandhi’s vow of celibacy, the guru decided he had to test himself by asking young women, including some of his relatives, to strip naked and lie next to him. That abuse, plus Gandhi’s racist and misogynist writings, makes yoga teacher Helen ( Jeri Lynn Cohen), Instagrammer Maya (Miranda Swain) and women’s studies professor Miriam (Patricia Silver) hatch a scheme to remove the statue of him behind the Ferry Building.
As the multigenerational trio hem and haw among themselves
about whether to vandalize public art and then defend their logic to Helen’s conservative daughter Rebecca (Lyndsy Kail) and Helen’s live-and-let-live husband, Bob (Howard Swain), their debates expand outward from Gandhi to so many of our dethroned men. Should we “separate the man from his message,” as Bob advocates? Or is it the case that, as Helen replies, “a man’s actions are his message”?
If Galjour’s script has a few pithy distillations like this one, as well as an urgent cry for us to see Gandhi truthfully, to feel what his victims must have felt and not dismiss them because Gandhi also happened to do great good in the world, “#GetGandhi” would also benefit from significant pruning.
Dialogue dillydallies, and a day after Saturday’s opening night, actors still seemed to be grasping in the dark for their lines, almost as if the script weren’t fully set but an outline they had to flesh out extemporaneously. Two of the would-be vandals spend a lot of stage time doing and talking about yoga without advancing plot or character, and Nancy Carlin’s direction made the stakes as crumbly as sand. One moment’s burning desire — to share a new idea for the statue; to get the statue and everyone involved with it out of his house — evaporates in the next, sans explanation or acknowledgment. Galjour raises specters of side plots, like how different generations or socioeconomic classes within feminism might have different privileges or goals, or how giving a woman freedom means she might not choose a classically feminist life path, but without fully fleshing them out.
Still, some moments in “#GetGandhi” transcend. When Swain’s Bob insists on tenderly brushing the hair of Kail’s Rebecca, all cooing appeasement and mewing sympathy for his adult child, a whole family history comes into focus. Or when the trio of bandits regale Bob with a breathless account of their villainy, all overlapping interjections and overzealous, clumsy re-enactments, the vandalism comes alive as surely as if the show had staged it. It’s as if only in telling Bob about it did it finally happen, and their euphoria in that moment is enough to fan the flames of your own, hopefully more legal, feminist insurrection.