DWORKIN FIGHTS HER WAY BACK FROM THE BRINK IN AFTERMATH
In 1999, Andrea Dworkin, the hardline feminist campaigner who had spent all her working life fighting a ferocious war against rape culture, was herself raped in a Paris hotel at the age of 52. She emerged from her ordeal devastated, of course, but also bewildered. That’s because her rapists had used a weapon she was relatively unfamiliar with back then, despite her research into all the toxic permutations of sexual violence. The weapon: a rape drug.
The Waterworks Company’s gruelling new show, Aftermath, puts Dworkin alone on stage except for several piles of her beloved books and a stepladder that sometimes serves as a lectern and may soon be used, it’s implied, as a way of ending a life suddenly rendered unbearable.
As Dworkin, Helena Levitt delivers an open wound of a performance under the lucid direction of Rob Langford and Tracey Houston. It’s like the sustained scream of a figure in a Greek tragedy tormented beyond endurance. Decked out in Dworkin’s trademark blue jeans and straggly hair, hobbling painfully around the stage, Levitt evokes the molten anger and keeps it on a rolling boil for almost the full 90 minutes.
The text is based on a self-revealing essay, written in the style of a suicide note, but not necessarily intended to be one. “A note in a bottle” is how Dworkin described it, one that was
eventually discovered by her life partner, John Stoltenberg, on her computer sometime after her death in 2005.
Playwright Adam Thorburn has, with Stoltenberg’s blessing, more or less halved this as yet unpublished work to a manageable playing time. But, perhaps out of understandable respect for the original, he hasn’t gone for the radical reshaping that might have transformed it into a more dynamic theatrical text. Maybe it works more effectively on the page, but in performance its digressions and repetitions give it a meandering feel that doesn’t always gain dramatic traction.
And as powerful and affecting as Levitt’s performance is, such a sustained level of anguish, with even the occasional moments of humour delivered as bludgeoning sarcasm, can’t help but wear itself out.
Tellingly, it’s in the occasional quieter moments that the drama really catches dramatic fire, such as when a seemingly drained and defeated Dworkin describes the rape a second time. Or the particularly powerful moment of numbed self-loathing when she forces herself to recall her own unforgivable cruelty toward her dog.
The piece has, of course, been given a ghastly new urgency in the light of the Bill Cosby revelations, with Dworkin agonizing over the horrible implications of drug rape. Might men have been given the means to consequence free rape? (Dworkin herself was met with sometimes scornful skepticism when she wrote a piece about that blurry afternoon in a Paris hotel.) Do these drugs overturn her lifelong belief that rapists are driven by violence? Might they simply want women transformed into inert, lifeless, usable objects? Levitt painfully conveys Dworkin’s sickened realization that this might indeed be so, and that the thought of it is even harder to bear than the most brutal violence.
There’s a renewed topicality, too, in Dworkin’s pugnacious attack on the Clintons, with Bill accused of being “President Rape” and Hillary of being his enabler and a most despicable traitor to her own sex. For good or ill (depending on where you stand), this is the Andrea Dworkin of fiery militant legend.
But Aftermath gives us a less familiar side to her too, not only the doubting, vulnerable, damaged survivor, but the woman who can wax with such tenderness about the love of her life. “Paul,” he’s called in the text, but he’s actually Stoltenberg, who’s attending several of the performances and taking part in aftershow talkbacks.