How To Defend Yourself by Liliana Padilla (review)

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Reviewed by:

• How To Defend Yourselfby Liliana Padilla
• Dan Venning

HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF. By Liliana Padilla. Codirected by Rachel Chavkin, Liliana Padilla, and Steph Paul. New York Theatre Workshop, New York. 03 21, 2023.

Sexual assault continues to plague college campuses despite the #MeToo movement, consent workshops, and protective measures put in place by college administrations, friend groups, and individual students. The Association of American Universities' statistic from their 2020 Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct—that 26.4% of undergraduate women surveyed at twenty-one schools in the United States had experienced some form of nonconsensual sexual contact—seems to ring true still. It is a rare year when I don't need to make at least one mandated report to my college's Title IX Officer after learning about a student's traumatic experiences. So when I saw Liliana Padilla's How to Defend Yourselfat New York Theatre Workshop in March 2023, I immediately knew that I would have to teach the play in my Contemporary American Theatre and Drama [End Page 564]course in the upcoming trimester—and that this was a play that should be taught and staged at colleges and universities across the US. Indeed, reading Padilla's text and describing the action as I had seen it just a few months earlier led one student to travel to New York to see the production before it closed and several others to write about the various ways it resonated with them personally. One student wrote: "This is a play I didn't know the theatre community needed until I read it myself. … I believe this play will make a difference in many students' lives[.] I know if I had found it a few years ago it would have made a difference in mine."

Padilla's play takes place in the wake of a violent sexual assault on a small predominantly white liberal arts college campus with an active fraternity and sorority social culture. (The playwright is specific about the racial identity of each character in her script, so these are noted here as well.) The perpetrators of the assault—students in a fraternity—have been arrested and do not appear in the play, and the victim Susannah is in the hospital. The entire play takes place in a gym where Brandi, the victim's white "big" (an already initiated sister who serves as a mentor to a younger sister) in a sorority, is leading a self-defense workshop along with Kara, a BIPOC sorority sister who is Susannah's best friend and their sorority's social chair. They are supported by Andy, a white member of the fraternity who is "earnestly eager to end rape culture and unpack the man box," and Eggo, one of only a few BIPOC members of the fraternity, who uses humor to hide his discomfort as a minoritized student at an institution where he does not feel fully welcome. Taking the workshop is the quiet and reserved BIPOC sophomore Nikki as well as two first-year students: Diana, a sexually adventurous, queer Mexican American, and her friend Mojdeh, an innocent straight Iranian American. Both Diana and Mojdeh are participating primarily so that they can make an impression on popular women in the sorority they hope to rush. Over the course of the play, each character reveals the ways in which their self-defense mechanisms have failed to protect them from gendered or racialized microaggressions, violence, or the overall cisheteropatriarchal white supremacy baked into colleges in the United States. Whether it is Brandi's black belt in karate, Kara's explicit and extreme sexuality, Eggo's humor, Andy's attempted internalization of the rhetoric and ideology of consent, or other such coping strategies, Padilla's play posits that ultimately these selfdefense mechanisms are futile. Toward the end of the play, the audience sees a moment from the frat party where Susannah was assaulted (although Susannah and her assaulters do not appear onstage), and then a high-school party, and then a middleschool party: at each of these earlier, more innocent celebrations, small acts of gender-based violations still exist. Finally, the...