Turning rape jokes on their ear: Adrienne Truscott gets last laugh in her show "Asking For It"

For years, says Adrienne Truscott, male comedians have been getting mileage out of jokes about rape and sexual assault, while politicians and other public figures have made astoundingly stupid remarks about the subject (recall Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s 2012 comment about “legitimate rape”) or gotten away with committing abuse (see: Harvey Weinstein).

And for years as well, notes Truscott, many women (and some men) have responded with anger to the idea that there’s anything funny about violence against women.

But Truscott, a longtime New York performance artist who’s branched into standup comedy in recent years, decided there was a better way to tackle the issue: subverting those jokes and the cultural norms around rape by making the jokes herself, as a way of asking what about our society allows men to feel OK about joking about rape.

And ever since she unveiled her one-woman show “Asking For It” in 2013, the issue has continued to resonate, Truscott notes, in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

“I never imagined in 2013 that I’d still be doing this show five years later,” she said in a recent phone call from her home. “I figured I’d get a year’s interest out of it … but now it seems it’s never at a loss for new topics to keep it fresh.”

Truscott, who brings “Asking For It” to Northampton’s Academy of Music Oct. 27, points to any number of highly public incidents concerning rape and sexual assault in the U.S. in recent years: the conviction of Bill Cosby and the arrest of Weinstein on sexual assault charges; Donald Trump’s bragging on tape about sexually assaulting women; and the just-concluded hearings on new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault when he was younger (Kavanaugh denied all charges).

“Clearly this issue is not going away,” Truscott said with a wry laugh.

Deborah J’Anthony, the Academy’s executive director, says “Asking For It” and two other upcoming women-devised performances are part of the theater’s longstanding “Women’s Work Initiative,” an effort to bring more programming by and about women to the area. She recalls that shortly after she began working at the Academy about 9½ years ago, she read a study on American theater saying 80 percent of plays being performed in the U.S. were written by men.

“In looking at the needs of our community, I thought ‘We need to encourage women’s voices, whether it’s new work or a retelling of older stories,’ ” she said. “We wanted to see more women-devised work on stage, whether it was something written or directed or designed by them … and today, there’s definitely more of that out there than when I started.”

J’Anthony says “Asking For It,” which will have its Valley debut at the Academy, meets all the criteria she’s looking for. “It’s very accessible, it’s funny and sensitive, and it’s also raw. But the way [Truscott] engages with the audience, it’s just very disarming even though it’s such a volatile subject.”

And, she added, “It’s very much from a women’s perspective.”

From burlesque to standup comedy

For starters, Truscott performs her show, as advance notes put it, “dressed only from the waist up and ankles down.” Her costume includes an oversize blonde wig, a short denim jacket, platform heels and little else (unless you count the cans of beer she drinks from during the show). It’s her riff on the old charge that a woman who dresses provocatively or drinks too much is inviting sexual assault.

“It was the most asking-for-it outfit I could think of,” she said. “But it’s not a sexy look.” Yet performing semi-naked, she adds, makes her feel empowered on stage. “I can feel when I get out there that there’s this expectation [in the audience] that I’m going to feel vulnerable, but actually I feel completely in control. I have the microphone, I’m directing the show.”

She takes on the persona of a ditzy sorority or party girl, but one who turns the tables on the old cliches by holding rape jokes up to the light of comic analysis. Her stage set includes head shots of male comedians who have made rape jokes, and sometimes the heads of those comedians are projected onto her bare stomach (like George Carlin, known for his “Rape Can Be Funny” monologue). She also routinely asks audiences for a show of hands on who’s been raped — or who’s committed one.

Truscott, who studied dance and theater at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and has taught those subjects, is also known as one-half of the Wau Wau Sisters, a burlesque-dance duo, and she has a number of other solo-performance shows that can involve significant choreography. But “Asking For It” came about in large part because she wanted to try her hand at standup comedy.

“I also wanted to explore this subject [of rape jokes], how we all talked about it, and I didn’t want it to be a diatribe or a lecture,” she said. “Comedy felt like a good way to go.”

Not long after she began devising her show, she got added impetus from a well-publicized event in 2012 when standup comedian Daniel Tosh, doing his routine at a Hollywood Club, made a series of rape jokes. A woman in the audience objected; Tosh responded by saying “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?”

Truscott says she’s not interested in censoring Tosh — “I’m super First Amendment” — or any other comedian on the issue. Instead, she likes to use her show to satirize comments like Tosh’s that she calls “just (expletive) stupid.”

As she’s revised “Asking For It” over the years to incorporate new material like Trump’s presidency, Truscott says she’s also had to consider her growing anger about how women’s accounts of being sexually assaulted are often treated by (mostly) male power figures and in the media. She points to the recent testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were teenagers, as a model of calmness and quiet resolve, while Kavanaugh’s angry denials were tantamount to “a baby screaming because it wants its diaper changed,” as she put it.

“When I made this show, I thought it would work better if I were approachable and likable,” she said. “But when I look at all this stuff that keeps happening, I feel less and less inclined to be likable.”

Here are two other upcoming woman-devised theater performances at the Academy of Music:

“The Other Mozart,” Nov. 17 — Actress, playwright and violinist Sylvia Milo created and stars in this one-woman show about Nannerl Mozart, the sister of Amadeus: a prodigy, keyboard virtuoso and composer who as a young girl performed throughout Europe with her brother, to equal acclaim. But she was forbidden to perform once she reached a marriageable age, and her work and her story faded away.

But drawing in part on Mozart family letters, Milo has brought the story back to life. She won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for this piece. 

Shut UP, Emily Dickinson! Jan. 19, 2019 — The Belle of Amherst gets a fresh look in this satire written by and starring writer/actress/comedian Tanya O’Debra, who’s currently an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith College (and who also works part time at the Academy). Her two-person play riffs on the famous reclusive poet and the “hysterically existential, sadomasochistic psycho-romance” that’s grown up around her. 

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

Adrienne Truscott’s
“Asking For It” takes place Oct. 27 at 8 p.m. at the Academy of Music in Northampton. For tickets
and additional information, visit aomtheatre.com.

 

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