Stage tackles consent and shaming
Two theatre productions opening in Toronto in the next several weeks revolve around the topical themes of young people, social media, consent and shaming.
Evan Placey’s Girls Like That, playing at Tarragon Theatre, follows a group of teenage female friends after a naked photo of one of their classmates goes viral on social media. And in Christine Quintana’s Selfie at Young People’s Theatre, a difficult situation between three high school friends around a sexual encounter gets even more complicated when one of them posts about it on Instagram.
Curious about what led the writers to take on this material, I met them for a dual interview at Tarragon, where Quintana, a Vancouverite, is spending the year on an Urjo Kareda emerging-artist residency.
Placey, who’s based in London, U.K., is visiting his native Toronto for the Tarragon run of Girls.
Placey was inspired to write his play, a commission from three major U.K. theatres about young people’s relationship to feminism, largely because a focus group he brought together seemed indifferent to the topic.
“Especially, young women were like, ‘We don’t need feminism. It’s all equal,’ ” he recalls. “I thought I’d like to explore that.”
Another point of provocation was the Amanda Todd case, particularly the media focus on the man who allegedly con- vinced Todd to pose topless and subsequently spread photos of her. “We can all agree he’s a bad guy,” Placey says.
“I thought, ‘Oh, I know why we’re focusing on him, because that’s really easy. It’s his fault. That’s why she killed herself.’”
In Placey’s view, more attention needed to paid to “how was (Todd) treated by her peers when she went to school — everyday bullying. Where are the parents of those kids who were doing those things? What were the teachers doing? Actually, it’s all of us. We’re all complicit. Because the issue actually isn’t about putting a photo online or not. It’s about how we react to that.”
What these situations too often turn into, Placey believes, is victim-blaming: “young women calling each other sluts. Why are young women using the tools men use to oppress women against each other?”
Quintana, too, found the spark of her play in highly publicized real-life cases, those of the sexual assault of young women in Maryville, Mo., and Steubenville, Ohio, in which social media played a major role.
“Something I think we do very well as Canadians is say, ‘That’s American football culture. That’s American corruption rape culture. It’s different here,’ ” Quintana says. “Well, it’s really not that different here. So I wanted to make a piece that was like, OK, how would it happen at your school? … And to take it to the most seemingly benign, grey interaction between two people who actually love and trust each other, to show how small that margin of error is, but how vast the consequences are.”
In Girls Like That, a number of characters fudge the details when asked if they shared the compromising online photo, some claiming they deleted it. “But actually, deleting it doesn’t do anything,” Placey says. “But we sort of push our hands away and say it’s not my problem.”
“That theme is in my play, too,” Quintana says. “Like, the idea of who you appear to be, who you brand yourself as and what your actions say about who you really are.”
Attributing these problems to social media is too easy, she argues.
“We’ve been doing that forever … and this kind of dodging accountability … is at the root of all these issues of why women get attacked for the things that happened to them. It’s that nobody wants to name perpetrators and the people who are accomplices to that.”
While he doesn’t believe that seeing a single play can change people’s behaviour, Placey hopes that seeing Girls Like That might “plant a seed. And, that ‘Aha!’ might come in … sometime later. Maybe it will let (a young audience member) think about something. Or they’ll engage in a conversation. Or a parent will go home, on the way from seeing the show, and have a chat.”
(While it was first commissioned and performed as a play for young audiences, Girls Like That is being presented in Tarragon’s mainstage season; Selfie is recommended for ages 13 and up.)
Quintana hopes her play suggests a need to “hone our listening to each other and to ourselves.”
While there’s a question of sexual consent at its centre, Selfie also draws attention to how, if we share information on social media or face to face without permission, that can also breach a trust: “The conversation I really want to start is, how do we treat each other with respect? And understand and ask for consent in all avenues of our life.”
Girls Like That plays at Tarragon Theatre until May 27: tarragontheatre.com or 416-5311827. Selfie has school performances at Young People’s Theatre April 23 to May 11, with public performances April 29 and May 6: youngpeoplestheatre.ca or 416-862-2222.
Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.