Gandhi faces the #MeToo movement in new comedy
Whenever a social justice movement starts to get off the ground, people with an interest in keeping uneven power dynamics skewed in their favor have a tendency to make slippery-slope arguments, positing the most extreme “what if” scenarios they can imagine.
The new play by Louisiana bayou-born San Francisco playwright Anne Galjour (“Hurricane,” “Mauvais Temps”) seems to depict that sort of outlandish situation for the #MeToo era. In “#GetGandhi,” a small group of San Francisco radical feminists decides to topple the Mohandas K. Gandhi statue outside the Ferry Building because of Gandhi’s controversial “brahmacharya” (celibacy) practice of having young women followers sleep naked next to him to test his purity. To these three present-day white American women, that fact alone makes the Mahatma nothing but a misogynist rapist who’s got to go.
Subtitled “A Seriously Radical Feminist Comedy,” the world premiere of “#GetGandhi” at San Francisco’s Z Below is the first production of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits Theatre Collective, a group of artists made up of Galjour, actors Jeri Lynn Cohen and Patricia Silver, and the play’s director, Nancy Carlin. Filling out the impressive cast of Bay Area all-stars are Lyndsy Kail and Carlin’s husband and daughter, Howard Swain and Miranda Swain.
“Jeri Lynn Cohen and Patty and I, we were looking for ways to work together, and I just started writing some scenes with them in mind,” Galjour says. “We were looking at some of these old radical feminists, like Mary Daly and Shulamith Firestone, and just batting around ideas. We kept getting together and writing and building scenes, and then when the #MeToo movement hit, these ideas in the work really started to gel, and it really felt like we were working on something that was part of a national conversation.”
The Gandhi idea came up early in that process, she says, and soon took on a life of its own.
“When we were reading and doing research early on, in Mary Daly’s seminal work, ‘Pure Lust,’ she talked about Mahatma Gandhi’s celibacy practice,” Galjour recalls. “It was really provocative. It raised a lot of questions about what constitutes consent or sexual assault, and questions around hero worship. And we also knew that the characters in the play were dealing with their own issues, their own pasts.”
Galjean says the work is a two-sided coin.
“It’s meant to spark dialogue and debate about, among a number of things, feminism or misguided feminism, or issues of sexual assault or hero worship or monuments. But it’s a romp; it’s a radical feminist romp.”
The play also marks a
welcome return of Galjour’s work to the Bay Area stage after a few years offstage. After her plays “Bird in the Hand” with Central Works in 2007 and “You Can’t Get There from Here” at Z Space in 2009, she did a couple of pieces with Robert Moses’ Kin dance company in 2010 and 2011, then went off to Louisiana for a new play called “Turtles & Alligators” in 2013.
“It’s just taken a while,” Galjour says. “We’ve just worked on this piece off and on, getting together when we could, pulling it together. I’ve also been writing some short stories, and I teach. And certainly being a grandmother — let’s just say family trumps a lot of stuff for me. So creating this play is woven with other things going on in my life. That’s just the way it is, particularly when you’re older. But we’re doing it.”