‘Revolt’ begins with wordplay
Toward the end of the latest from Crowded Fire — “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.” — ensemble member Elissa Beth Stebbins briefly becomes a character who sells “merch” emblazoned with bromides of girl power. “Stop being sexist!” she chirps in Valley girl intonation. “Let’s be equal, yeah?”
Among the myriad revolts fomented by Alice Birch’s play, whose West Coast premiere opened Monday, March 5, at the Potrero Stage, is one against commodified feminism — feminism you can buy and sell, feminism that fits on a T-shirt, feminism that suggests its own project is complete when we’re chastened by a scold, when we bleat a mantra.
You can tell a show is genuinely radical when it somehow both scares you and instills in you the thrill of power. “Revolt,” directed by Rebecca Novick, is not a flawless piece; one abstract passage that repeatedly refers to “the thought” never comes alive, and the final scene makes too explicit ideas that had previously summoned their power from mere suggestion. But this whirlwind collage of scenes, this anarchic cacophony of a play is that rare theatrical work that lives up to the revolutionary promise of its title.
An opening scene of foreplay between a man (Soren Santos) and a woman (Stebbins) reveals how seemingly innocent male lines — like “I don’t understand how you do what you do to me” or “You look completely perfect” or “I want to make love to you” — invisibly but relentlessly steamroll heterosexual interactions toward female objectification and oppression, toward male pleasure and hegemony. Birch has Stebbins’ character resist that inexorable momentum at every turn, and the pair of actors make a crisply choreographed dance of coitus then interruptus and back again. The interrupters? She replaces one preposition with another. She deep-dives into the power implications and aural awkwardness of the gerund “putting.”
It’s hilarious and, unsurprisingly, deadly to the male libido to try to write a new language and practice for heterosexual sex that’s truly egalitarian. Above all, what comes across is the infinite reserves of intelligence, vigilance, creativity, clarity of purpose, bravery and willingness to be annoying that resistance requires. Even if you work hard at your own feminism, it’s hard not to feel how easy it would be for Stebbins’ character to just give in and have sex. Or in the next scene, for Leigh Rondon-Davis’ character to just give in to a marriage proposal. Or in still the next scene, for Karla Acosta’s character to just accept that her boss (Gabriel Christian) isn’t going to let her take Mondays off.
Birch’s characters write multiple idioms of resistance: an aria of placeholders like “what it was like was if”; a poetic expansion of words like “spread” so that all their multivalent dictionary definitions pertain simultaneously; a bloody refusal to speak, an active silencing of the self. Perhaps most devastating is a monologue wrenchingly delivered by Cat Luedtke, when grocers ask her “what the f— you thought you were doing lying in the middle of aisle seven with your dress over your head.”
Her answer — “you cannot overpower (my body) because I have given it” — in addition to being one of the saddest phrases ever uttered onstage, explodes the concepts of choice and consent, concepts that drive so many contemporary discussions of gender relations and sex. Even they limit us, Birch points out. What is it we’re consenting to? Which options, exactly, are we permitted to choose among? By the end of “Revolt,” you still might not be able to list all those options, but you’ll be sure there are more than we’ve been given, more than we’ve imagined.