Sexual violence explored in play starring survivors
WARNING: This story deals with subject matter that some readers might find disturbing
Montreal playwright Yael Farber knows sexual violence against women is endemic in India and elsewhere.
But like millions around the world, she was particularly affected by the case of Jyoti Singh Pandey, who died after a group of men gang raped her on a bus for hours.
"It was one of those cases that just became a tipping point, sociologically, for people," she told On The Coast's Gloria Macarenko. "[Sexual violence] became utterly untenable for one particular morning in the world."
"There was a confluence of very specific strands in this narrative that somehow perforated an everyday numbness for most of us to this subject matter," she said, including the graphic and brutal nature of the crime and the poverty of Pandey's life.
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Farber's new play, Nirbhaya — which means "fearless" in Hindi, and became the nickname of Pandey — deals with this case in her "testimonial" style theatre, built on real experience.
In the play, actors tell their own stories of the sexual violence they themselves have endured. The idea, Farber said, was to highlight how cases like Pandey's are not isolated or anomalous.
A 'delicate' process
Farber began work on the play days after Pandey's story first broke.
She spent time in India doing research, and then put out a call on social media for actors and even non-actors who wanted to tell their stories in a public forum. She interviewed them, and picked five women to be in the company.
She calls the process of adapting their stories a "delicate" one, but an extremely important one.
"By witnessing these stories, our very strong mission has always been, from the very beginning, that shame does not belong with the survivor, although it is somehow located, always, with the survivor in sexual violence," she said.
"The shame and the loss of honour is the perpetrator's. And when one breaks one's silence, one relocates that guilt and shame … to where it rightfully belongs. With the perpetrator."
Farber says the process of the actors re-telling their own stories of sexual violence night after night has been trying, but she believes it's better than the alternative.
"Silence is much heavier. It exacts a much higher price," she said. "There's a corrosive element to silence."
Nirbhaya makes its Vancouver premiere at the York Theatre on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and runs until Nov. 14.