Theater: “How to Defend Yourself” at NYTW

A college woman is raped and beaten by two bros during a wild frat party. You hear about it on the news and as a fellow female student, you suddenly feel vulnerable. So you sign up for a course in “How to Defend Yourself,” which also happens to be the title of Liliana Padilla’s new play at New York Theater Workshop.

Brandy (Teagan Meredith), the instructor, means business as she addresses the three women who show up for the first class. She shows them the best points on the body to attack, demonstrates proper fighting stance, and in a subsequent class discusses the do’s and don’ts of giving or denying consent. Brandy even invites two frat boys (Jayson Lee and Sebastian Delascasas) to assist.

But something starts to happen that’s not on the syllabus. The conversation in the class moves away from ways to discouraging an attacker, to the women discussing their sexual fantasies. The two men respond by speaking about their own sexual confusion in dating The play is even handed at dealing with both male and female desire. Things get interesting.

The young cast is uniformly excellent, especially Gabriella Ortega as the scrappy young Latina, and the wiry Delacasas, who performs the kind of sexy strip-tease you might see at a gentleman’s club” in New York City.

I enjoyed this play a lot but I’d love to know what a college student, male or female, thinks about “How to Defend Yourself.”  If you have a college-age kid and you live in Metro New York, take them to see “How to Defend Yourself.” They’d be better at judging its veracity than I am. Truth is, I haven’t been on a campus since Gerald Ford was president