Female trouble

Sheila Callaghan won’t name names. Though the savvy theatergoer may notice parodic potshots—at Neil LaBute, Adam Rapp, Quentin Tarantino, even Chuck Mee—in her aggressive new metaromp, That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play, the writer says it shouldn’t be seen as a feminist feud with specific male peers. “I don’t want to call anybody out; it’s a cultural phenomenon,” says Callaghan after a playfully profane rehearsal with director Kip Fagan and a game cast. “Individual writers aren’t the target; the male gaze is the target, and that’s more or less in our collective unconscious.”

The playwright points to the article, though, that lit her ire: A 2005 New York Times preview piece that breathlessly looked forward to a season of male-oriented drama. “It was about a season of 'men behaving badly,’?” Callaghan recalls, “where the writer giddily documented all of the reprehensible characters who were thomping on the boards. It had a boys-will-be-boys-and-we’ll-pay-to-see-it kind of attitude.”

Callaghan—a complicated package as likely to cite Howard Stern as James Joyce as influences—doesn’t exempt herself from consideration. “The play started out as a reaction to that kind of nasty, misogynistic stuff,” she recalls, “and turned into an investigation of why we—meaning me—find it compelling and repulsive at the same time.” Indeed, what started as a raunchy cry of outrage grew into something more reflective. “The play turned,” Fagan agrees. “At first, Sheila started to write just an inversion: Instead of guys, it was chicks who were violent and aggressive, who would fuck people and then shoot them in the face. But the play has become more probing and penetrating.”

Callaghan, 35, puts it more succinctly: “It’s critiquing the images at the same time it’s trafficking in them.” And since she’s the author who conjured a talking apartment in Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) and a ravers’ fairy tale in Kate Crackernuts, it’s not surprising that the images in That Pretty Pretty include a welter of hilarious non sequiturs and jarring juxtapositions. In telling the tale of a pair of feminist vigilantes slaughtering Christian right-wingers and gleefully blogging about their spree, Callaghan mashes up Abu Ghraib and Bon Jovi, Harold Pinter and Jane Fonda’s workout videos. Blood, Jell-O and other fluids feature heavily.

So does Fonda herself, who appears as a kind of clueless muse. Putting her onstage as a character began with a challenge from Fagan, for whom Callaghan wrote the play while in the midst of fulfilling a series of more straitlaced assignments for theaters like South Coast Repertory and Playwrights Horizons.

“I was all commissioned up, but I had other material that I wanted to put into a play and no one to write it for,” Callaghan explains. “So I wrote it for Kip, and I asked him, 'What do you want in it?’?” On the director’s wish list were an inner tube (no dice) and a Jane Fonda workout video. The latter not only made the cut but started to take over whole scenes. Fagan thinks he knows why. “She’s hypersexualized, but she’s a lot of people’s idea of what a feminist hero is,” the director says. Callaghan elaborates on a cultural trope she loves to hate: “She’s been through a lot of abuse, and she can take it. She went to Vietnam to prove her point, and the world turned on her, but she took it. Her French husband used to make her do threesomes, and even though she didn’t want to, she did it because she loved him. She’s such a survivor.”

It’s this pop-cultural version of “empowered” womanhood that Callaghan finds both hilarious on one level—and not at all funny at bottom. Hence the equivocation of the title. “I wanted to make sure that people understood that it wasn’t about anything pretty, really,” Callaghan says of adding The Rape Play to the marquee. “There’s a seriousness at the heart of it. It’s ribald, but I don’t just think these are fun things—I think they’re damaging on some level.” So is this Callaghan’s “in-yer-face” drama? Responds Fagan, “I don’t think it is one of those plays, but it’s about that kind of play.” Callaghan, natural wordsmith that she is, deadpans: “I feel like it’s too cheeky to be in-yer-face.”—

That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play is at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre.

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