Joan Marcus
On Broadway, Jessica Chastain’s coup de théâtre at the climax of A Doll’s House is a genuine, slack-jaw making surprise. Surely, it cannot be matched or even outdone.
Well, Liliana Padilla’s sharply excellent play, How to Defend Yourself (New York Theatre Workshop, to April 2) has a visually striking denouement that gives an equivalent frisson of shock. It caps Padilla’s nuanced, saltily direct, moving, very funny play—directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin, and Steph Paul—about what safety really means for a group of young women (and two men).
The audience is facing the confines of a college gym where a group of young women gather to learn the techniques of self-defense. The class is led by the tautly muscled, extremely focused Brandi (Talia Ryder), a VP of a college sorority who wants to inculcate the skills necessary to neutralize attackers. On You-Shin Chen’s evocative set featuring mats and padded walls, Brandi shows that she has all the moves, all the right words. She is extra-determined to teach them because an unseen friend, Susannah, is in hospital after a particularly vicious sexual assault (the play discusses but does not show the assault, or any other assault).