New play C’mon, Angie! speaks to the #MeToo era

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      “Perpetrator and victim: these are two characters struggling against those labels.”

      Director Lauren Taylor has paused rehearsal so she can offer these notes to actors Kayla Deorksen and Robert Moloney. Opening night of Touchstone Theatre’s newest production, C’mon, Angie!, by local playwright Amy Lee Lavoie, is a week away. The play’s tag line is a brilliant nod to a significant aspect of the contemporary #MeToo movement—“He said. She knew.”—and the room feels appropriately, understandably tense as they resume the emotionally explosive scene.

      In the play, Reed, played by Moloney, thinks his one-night stand with Angie (Deorksen) was just fulfilling a sexual fantasy. She says it was a violation, and their confrontation is Lavoie’s attempt to unpack consent and why it’s still treated as a mystifying, messy concept rather than a given. From the cast to the crew, C’mon, Angie! is not easy material for anyone involved.

      “Pretty much everyone in the room had a personal experience with this situation,” Taylor says during a lunch-break interview with the Straight, Lavoie, and assistant director Naomi Vogt. The almost daily occurrence of further accusations against more and more men has meant that difficult and potentially traumatizing conversations about sexual assault, consent, and coercion are the new normal for many women. This was the situation Lavoie repeatedly found herself in a few years ago, when high-profile cases against Jian Ghomeshi, Brock Turner, and Bill Cosby were in the news.

      “It was the conversations I was having about those cases with people in the privacy of my home,” Lavoie says. “The pervasiveness of some of the problematic thinking and thought patterns from my male acquaintances and friends—it [writing C’mon, Angie!] was really a chance for me to work out the tremendous amount of frustration I was feeling at that point.”

      Though she began writing from a place of anger, Lavoie crafted C’mon, Angie! to also reflect how women are changing the culture of shame and stigma following an assault or violation, by finding power in breaking their silence, coming forward, and naming what has happened to them.

      “One of the things we’re really excited about exploring is it’s her [Angie’s] need that she’s fulfilling, not his,” Vogt says. “In this play, it’s her saying to him, ‘You did this, and this is the impact.’ It’s about her being seen and she’s asking for that recognition for her, not so that he can go into the world with a new state of enlightenment. It’s so that she can enter the world feeling like her truth has been spoken.”

      “We’re part of this incredible movement right now and figuring out, like, ‘Okay, so how do we want to move forward and how do we address the things in the culture that are perpetuating this shit?’ ” Taylor says. The answer is clearly visible, if complicated in execution. “It’s exhausting because we haven’t solved patriarchy, so we often feel like we’re screaming into the void.”

      To keep guard against the rawness of both the subject matter and the times in which we live, Lavoie credits Taylor with the safe space she created in rehearsal. Taylor recruited Amy Rutherford, an actor who is also training in expressive-arts therapy, to create a series of exercises that would help establish boundaries for everybody between their work/stage lives and their personal lives. Still, Taylor says, “This has probably, honestly and truly, been one of the most challenging processes that I’ve ever been through, because it’s butted up against every single cell in my body, every single thing that just makes me crazy with rage.”

      And yet, there’s hope. In fact, Taylor sees plays like Lavoie’s as being a crucial part of moving humanity to a place of greater understanding. “We socialize each other as humans,” Taylor says. “When we’re watching human beings in front of us speak this, and live and breathe it—I think that’s the power of theatre.”

      C’mon, Angie! runs from Friday (June 1) to June 9 at the Firehall Arts Centre.

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