On Friday evening I attended the show “Extremities” by William Mastrosimone. The powerful play attacked the serious issue of sexual assault. The production was excellently put together by a team of Emerson students and was funded by Emerson Peace and Social justice, and the Kappa Gamma Chi professional sorority.
The cast and crew of this production should be praised for not only their clear talent and dedication to the project, but their sincere desire to create a conversation about rape and sexual assault on Emerson’s campus.
As a rape survivor I recognize the urgency of this issue on our campus.
As I have begun to heal and become stronger regarding my ability to talk about my experience, I have realized that Emerson, just like all college campuses, needs to address the assaults that continue to happen among young adults. Rape and sexual assault are epidemics and their reported frequency has risen 350% since the 1980’s. This is unacceptable.
The main plot of the show Extremities is the story of a young, unemployed woman living in a farmhouse named Marjorie. While her two roommates are working and she’s in her home alone, a man name Raul breaks into her house and sexually assaults her. Raul forces himself on her, and Marjorie struggles to get away. The painful terror that Marjorie expresses shows the audience a victim’s pure horror in these types of situations. In a desperate act of escape, Marjorie reaches for a very harmful substance that kills insects and sprays it in Raul’s eyes to stop his assault.
When Raul falls to the floor in pain from the burning sensation in his eyes, Marjorie escapes. She ties Raul up and tortures him until her roommates return home from work. The play ends with the two victims, Raul and Marjorie, both finding peace in the harmful crimes that they were subjected to. At one time in the play both Raul and Marjorie were in crisis, but by the end they both feel as if justice has been served .
The way Extremities artfully portrays the struggle for power between Raul and Marjorie shows the emotions victims and perpetrators go through during destructive acts like sexual assault. Although Marjorie is never raped, I felt a strong connection to her character. She was assaulted by a man she had never met, but a man that knew her particularly well from months of stalking. I was attacked by a college student at MIT who knew a friend of mine from Emerson. Both of these situations show that the worst can happen even in your own home or around people you trust.
It is revolting that young adults have to deal with the seriousness of sex crimes, but I feel particularly proud to say Emerson is starting the conversation on stepping up to the epidemic plaguing our age group.
Unlike Marjorie, I, and most victims, never get justice in the form she did. We do not get to fight back and hurt our attacker like he or she hurt us. However, justice is not only found in fighting back physically or seeing your attacker behind bars. Justice can be found by working to end the sexual assault epidemic we face today, and trying to prevent these situations from occurring in the future.
Extremities helped other Emerson students understand the emotions that come with being sexually assaulted. This on its own made it extremely successful. With that being said, there was one major problem with the play that had nothing to do with the production, acting, or crew that consisted of only Emerson students.
Mastrosimone took on a hard project, writing one of the first theatrical productions about rape. For the most part, the script is realistic, powerful, and moving. One aspect of the script that bothered me was the fact that Raul, the rapist, is characterized as being Hispanic. Making the enemy a minority shows the shallowness of this writer. I commend Mastrosimone for tackling the issue of sexual assault, but it was not necessary to tag it on a certain race or ethnicity. Rape is committed by men and women of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. It is not a crime that singles anyone out and is something that can happen to anyone without warning.
I believe that Emerson’s community, and the audience of Extremities, moved past the fact that the attacker was marked as Hispanic. Rather than focusing on this racist element of the play, we as a community focused on the important message; ending sexual assault and making sure no other Emerson student experiences the horror of a sexual crime.