In the myth of Persephone, the daughter of the harvest goddess is raped by the lord of the Underworld and taken down to his dark domain. Though she is ultimately released, he still has power over her and she must return to his realm for half of every year.
That story forms the central metaphor in Rescuing Persephone, a theater piece created and performed by survivors of sexual abuse. Child-rape by an older man, whose injunction to be still and silent is frighteningly powerful, very often leads to a half-life of nightmare memories and self-destructive behavior in the girl-become-woman. Secrets from the past become chains that keep her from emerging into the air.
“There is a desperate need for survivors to bring a voice to the public struggle to end sexual violence,” says Melissa Penley, artistic director of the Survivor Theatre Project and herself a survivor of abuse. “As an artist, I feel a strong desire to do something creative and constructive with my anger and sadness about the realities of sexual violence.”
Rescuing Persephone is a collage of survivors’ stories drawn together with poetic text, expressive movement and original music. Breaking through “the paralysis of body memories,” the four performers indict the misogyny and hypocrisy that permits sexual abuse to exist and remain hidden, and the “social cannibalism” that condemns survivors to misplaced shame and inchoate rage.
Rescuing Persephone: Oct. 23, 7 p.m., Dynamite Space, Thornes Marketplace, Northampton; Oct. 24, 1 p.m., Wildlife Sanctuary, #349 Arts & Industry Building, Florence, with a workshop for survivors, allies and healers. (828) 230-3178, www.survivortheatreproject.com.
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Naomi Iizuka’s Polaroid Stories, opening this weekend at Smith College, takes place in the underworld of disaffected urban street kids. Iizuka’s script, based on her conversations with homeless teenagers, weaves classical allegories into its snapshots of street life. The 10 young scroungers who populate this urban Hades are, as director Daniel Kramer puts it, “self-mythologizing,” adopting mythic identities to help them cope with life in the cold world.
The kid called “D,” for Dionysus, is a drug dealer, dispenser of narcotic revelry; Eurydice is followed, as if by “a bad dream,” by an abusive Orpheus; Narcissus is a self-absorbed gay hustler; Skinhead Girl, aka Ariadne, is lost in the urban labyrinth; and Persephone fancies herself queen of her trashed underworld.
The play’s brutal/poetic episodes, paralleling stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reflect the ways the young people have transformed their own self-images to create “the stories they tell about themselves, the ways they want to present themselves,” Kramer says. The classical overlay also makes for “the perfect Smith play, in the sense that a liberal arts education should give you a great classical grounding with which to address the contemporary world.”
The play, we are advised, “contains strong language and adult situations”—no surprise, as the Act One subtitle is “Fucked-Up Love Songs.”
Polaroid Stories: Oct. 21-23, 27-30, 8 p.m., Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center, Smith College, Northampton. 585-ARTS (2787), www.smith.edu/smitharts.
