Reviewed by:

• How To Defend Yourselfby Liliana Padilla
• Dan Venning

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...

 校订者：

• 
  如何保护自己莉莲娜·帕迪拉 （Liliana Padilla）
•  丹·文宁

尽管大学行政部门、朋友团体和学生个人采取了 #MeToo 运动、同意研讨会和保护措施，但性侵犯继续困扰着大学校园。美国大学协会 （Association of American Universities） 在其 2020 年 AAU 校园气候调查关于性侵犯和性行为不端的报告中的统计数据——在美国 21 所学校接受调查的本科生中，有 26.4% 的人经历过某种形式的未经同意的性接触——似乎仍然适用。在了解学生的创伤经历后，我很少不需要向我所在大学的 Title IX 官员提交至少一份强制性报告。因此，当我在 2023 年 3 月在纽约戏剧工作坊看到莉莲娜·帕迪拉 （Liliana Padilla） 的《如何保护自己》时，我立即知道，在即将到来的学期里，我将不得不在我的当代美国戏剧和戏剧 [End Page 564] 课程中教授这部剧——这是一部应该在美国各地的学院和大学教授和上演的戏剧。事实上，阅读帕迪拉的文字并描述我几个月前看到的行动，导致一名学生在演出结束前前往纽约观看了这部作品，而其他几名学生则写下了它与个人产生共鸣的各种方式。一位学生写道：“这是一部我不知道戏剧界需要的戏剧，直到我自己读了它。…我相信这部剧会改变许多学生的生活。我知道如果我几年前找到它，它会对我产生影响。

帕迪拉的戏剧发生在一所以白人为主的小型文理学院校园发生暴力性侵犯之后，该校园拥有活跃的兄弟会和姐妹会社会文化。（剧作家在她的剧本中对每个角色的种族身份都有具体说明，所以这里也注明了这些。袭击的肇事者——兄弟会的学生——已被逮捕，没有出现在剧中，受害者苏珊娜正在医院。整部剧发生在一个健身房，受害者的白人“大”（一个已经启蒙的姐姐，担任妹妹的导师）在联谊会中，正在与 Kara 一起领导一个自卫研讨会，Kara 是 BIPOC 联谊会的姐妹，她是 Susannah 最好的朋友，也是他们联谊会的社交主席。他们得到了兄弟会的白人成员安迪（Andy）的支持，安迪（Andy）是兄弟会的白人成员，他“热切渴望结束强奸文化并打开男人的盒子”，而埃戈（Eggo）是兄弟会中为数不多的 BIPOC 成员之一，他用幽默来掩盖他作为少数族裔学生在一个他感到不完全受欢迎的机构中的不适。参加研讨会的是安静而内敛的 BIPOC 大二学生 Nikki 和两名一年级学生：戴安娜，一个性冒险的酷儿墨西哥裔美国人，和她的朋友莫伊德，一个无辜的伊朗异性恋美国人。戴安娜和莫吉德参加主要是为了给她们希望冲的联谊会中的受欢迎女性留下印象。在戏剧的过程中，每个角色都揭示了他们的自卫机制如何未能保护他们免受性别或种族化的微侵犯、暴力或美国大学中的整体异族制白人至上主义。 无论是布兰迪的空手道黑带、卡拉明确而极端的性行为、埃戈的幽默、安迪试图将同意的修辞和意识形态内化，还是其他类似的应对策略，帕迪拉的戏剧都假设这些自我防御机制最终是徒劳的。在戏剧的结尾，观众看到了苏珊娜被袭击的兄弟会派对的时刻（尽管苏珊娜和她的袭击者没有出现在舞台上），然后是高中派对，然后是初中派对：在每一个更早、更无辜的庆祝活动中，基于性别的小规模侵犯行为仍然存在。最后，...