The New Yorker Radio Hour - “Slut: The Play,” an Empowering Story for Young Women

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

In “Slut: The Play,” Katie Cappiello captures the trauma of sexual assault, based on the stories of teen-agers in her theatre company. (Hilton Als wrote about the play for the magazine.) A member of the cast, Mary Miller, tells David Remnick that the play inspired her to tell her own story for the first time outside a therapist’s office. Cappiello, the artistic director of the Arts Effect NYC, asks, “Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out?” In a conversation with Remnick, she explains what she’s learned from working with teen-age boys on a play about sexual aggression and violence. Also, Ian Frazier visits the farm of the future, in an industrial building in New Jersey; Siri has some special instructions for when you’ve had a few too many to navigate safely. These segments originally aired on March 4, 2016, and January 13, 2017.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is real. The observatory straight of the block for West Boulevard and makes that right. They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. She's subconsciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening. It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to, the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. We're living in a moment now where issues of sexual violence and harassment and power are being discussed more widely and more openly than ever before. Most recently, the deluge of accusations against Harvey Weinstein, here in the New Yorker and in the New York Times, has led to a movement on social media with women primarily, sharing their experiences under the hashtag, Me Too. One of the most dramatic accounts of these issues that I've scene lately was a work of theater. It's a play that was on

stage here in New York last year and has toured around the country. The cast was made up entirely of teenage girls, students of an acting teacher named Katie Capiello. But this wasn't kids' theater, not in the least. The topic of the play and some of the language are intended for

mature audiences, so if you have younger kids listening with you right now, this might not be for them. The play is about a teenage girl who was raped by friends, or seeming friends. It's fiction, technically speaking, but it's inspired by experiences that are very much a part of daily life for the cast. It's called Slut, the play. The main character spends the bulk of the show alone on one side of the stage,

giving her testimony about what happened to her. While on the other side of the stage, we hear everything that's being said about her as the news gets around. Okay, Joanna Grace Del Marco. I'm 16 years old. and I live at 545 East 14th Street, apartment 3F. What? Oh, sure. I am agreeing to give this statement without my parents present. Is that what you mean?

My mom's still here, right? No, oh my God, no, I don't need them to come in or anything. I actually really don't want to talk about all this stuff in front of her again right now. Or my dad. I'm sorry. I actually don't feel that well. Could I have some water or something? Would that be okay?

If it's too much trouble, that's totally fine. Okay, yeah, thank you. I'm sure I'll feel better after I have some of this. I'm just starting to feel sort of shaky. So should I just start from the beginning? That's Winifred Bonjean Alpert in the role of Joey. Katie Capiello is the playwright and director, and I spoke with her last year. So the character is Joey Del Marco.

She's 16. She is fierce and confident and kind of a badass and finding herself, right? She's at that great stage in your teenage years where things are really confusing but also really exciting. And she is coming into her womanhood. And that's where you meet her. And we follow Joey through the course of the night. And she is pre-gaming with three of her closest guys. friends from her life. And they cram into the back of a taxi to go uptown to a friend's house

party. And that's when those three friends proceed to rape her. Yeah. And the bulk of the play is the aftermath in which you have on one half of the stage, you have Joey in isolation, testifying a kind of extended testimony and soliloquy. And then on the other side of the stage, you have the village. I've known Joey since kindergarten. She loses control sometimes. She's done weird shit before. And honestly,

I totally think that night she got home with Jane and her parents were there and she just started lying. And she really screwed over the whole school. I'll say I'm admittedly promiscuous. I hate that word. Promiscuous. So that like

implies what then? That I couldn't have been raped then? That cancels out the possibility of rape to people. That's so crazy. I wanted you to get both at the same time. I wanted you get her rationale where she was coming from, her experience from her voice. At the same time that you were hearing the way we as a culture dissect everything these girls do. Because here's a really interesting thing when you think about rape cases. When you about the ones that we've heard about the case of St. Paul's, the case of Steubenville, Daisy Coleman, you so rarely hear from the girl. We so rarely get to hear that girl's voice

and her side of the story for a lot of reasons, for her own safety, legally. And we wanted that girl's voice to be front and center. And at the same time, we wanted you to realize who you are in this story. Who are you? Who are you in the community? What role do you play when this girl comes forward and this story comes out? Right. How are you tearing her down? Right? Like, how are you poking holes in her story?

Because you probably are. Katie, what is the origin story of the play itself? How much does real life inform what you've written about here? Everything. You know, I was a teenage girl, and those memories are so vivid for me. And I would say most women that I talk to would say the same that what you experience when you are young and female follows you the rest of your life. It stays with you. And when I work with my girls, with my students, and they tell me the things that they've experienced is impossible for me not to write about that.

I want to find some way of capturing it and putting it up on its feet that maybe will lead to health. your dynamics or maybe at least to a conversation or maybe just give somebody a better idea of what it is like to be a teenage girl because it is not easy and it's not easy to be teenage boy either. In fact, you do a play with teenage boys. Yes. This came later than Slot. It did. What did you discover about teenage boys that you might not have known through the research for it or the writing of it? Oh, just how really loving they are.

and really confused. And I was not expecting that. I never, I did not think they were going to be as open as they were, as honest about the degree of confusion that they experienced day in and day out in their relationships with each other, with their parents, with girls. But confusion that causes them to be aggressive and worse. Yeah, I would tie that confusion into pressure too. Right.

You know, standards of masculinity are pretty intense. How do you help from having at least, least some hostility toward the purveyors of the sexual violence, because it does seem to work in one direction? I guess at the end of the day, I care about them. I know that maybe that sounds trite, but that's, I guess, how I went into this process of working with these guys, that I care about them. And the reality of the situation is this.

As much as I don't want my female students to get raped, I don't want my male students to rape them. And, you're at, look, the young women, the girls that you're working with here, they're all actresses and students that are exactly the age of their characters. They're 14, they're 15, they're 16, they're 17. You're asking them to go into incredibly difficult, emotional territory on stage in front of, you know, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and up. What's the effect of that?

How does that dynamic work? What have you seen happen? You know, it's interesting. I feel like people ask that all the time in a very accusatory way of just how could you do this? How could you let teenage girls get up on the stage and talk about sex and sexuality and sexual assault? And my answer is always, but this is what they're living every day. So who better to talk about it? Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out? And the reality of the situation is they can handle it and they want to handle it. And the girls will tell. you, this show has empowered them. It allows them to be at a house party on a Friday night and intervene when maybe before they started working on this play, they didn't know that they could or didn't know how they should. We also have here a remarkable young actress who goes to St. Anne's High School in Brooklyn named Mary Miller, who was in the play, and she plays a character who, it seems, is almost the wise woman. She comes in late.

in the play, by way almost of giving advice to these slightly younger girls in the play, she relays an experience that Mary that maybe you could tell us about. Yeah, so my character, she hears online, she sees online, basically all the things have been going on in Joey, the main character's life. And so she reaches out to her to try to have a moment of camaraderie between the two of them because Sylvie is a survivor of rape herself and has never come forward about it, did not go through the process.

Like Joey goes through, and so Sylvie reaches out to her to tell her that she believes her, but also she wants to have another person in her life. So I, yeah, I do say... Because she's feeling isolated as well. Yeah, because she didn't tell anyone. How did you two meet?

How did you come together? She babysat for my mom's best friends. That's true. That's true. I babysat for everybody. I just want to say that. I was a nanny, you know, as I was building this company, and I feel like I babysat for all of Brooklyn.

How did you encounter the play? So I saw the play when I was, I guess, a summer before my sophomore year. Where did you see it? I saw it the first time it ever was on. I saw it at the fringe festival. What was your emotional reaction to it the first time you saw it? I remember one. I'm wanting to cry and not really knowing why, but I didn't.

I didn't cry. You resisted it. Yeah, I remember wanting to, but not really knowing why I did. You know what I noticed when I saw the play? Half the girls at the end of the play are in tears. Half them, Katie. Is that a common thing? Yeah.

You mean the girls on the stage? It takes an incredible... It's amazing. And then I turned around. The rest of us were in puddles. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it when people cry.

And these girls are going through it, right? I mean, what we tell them is that the way that it is going to most move the audience and most leave the audience changed is if they really go through something on stage. It's not their job to get up there and role play. It's their job to get up there and experience something in front of everybody, in front of everybody in that theater. And that's an incredibly hard thing to do. And it's emotionally draining for these girls. Yeah, I oftentimes, like, it'll take me. Yes.

It'll take me a minute sometimes. A minute. I think half the audience was a basket case into the next day. Right, but you get good at it when you do it all the time. And especially if you're me who's someone who I don't, it's not like this. You have to go home and do homework. Yeah, I have to go home and do homework. But also, it's not like the only time I ever deal with rape is when I'm in the show.

Like, I'm kind of good at crying about it for a minute and then getting it together. You kind of have to be. That's how it goes. Now, we find out because you were honest enough. and brave enough to say so in the talkbacks afterwards that the experience the character has where she goes to visit a college and at a party is assaulted, is raped,

is similar to something that happened to you. Yeah, yeah. And tell me about what that was like the first time to get up on a stage with an audience filled with people with strangers and talk about this. This is, was it terrifying? Was it helpful?

Was it some, something of both? Oh, God, it was a lot of things. So, yeah, I have some similar experiences to my character, not the same story by any means, but that distance from me to Sylvie is what turns, what you would assume to be a really, really hard thing to do, just to get up on stage and talk about rape.

into something that was actually not so hard because it wasn't me. I'm not me when I'm talking. I'm this other girl. I'm not telling my story. I'm telling hers. That part of it made it a lot easier and allowed me to accept my similarities to Sylvie and present them in a way that was ultimately very cathartic for me, but also maintain some distance.

And, you know, it's not... So it's very different from, say, a therapeutic environment. Yeah, it's different for me. I mean, I started doing the show in North Dakota. It was my first show. You got to open somewhere. Yeah, right? And I didn't know anyone from the entire state.

So that's a very different thing to do. And probably the best way for me to start doing it was to be doing the show in front of people that I had never met and would never see again in my life. I got to be open and truthful about my life in North Dakota before I ever did it at home. And I came back the next week, and I started to do it at home. And I just have to say, North Dakota, after the workshop that we did,

Mary did a really powerful storytelling. And then after the performance, there were teenage girls, like in a line waiting to talk to Mary. That's true. Because so many girls out there who have had this happen to them, who have experienced sexual assault in whatever form,

having no one to talk to about it. I sort of met my Sylvie in a way in North Dakota. That's amazing. What happened? So we did this workshop and I wrote this thing. In addition to the play. In addition to the play, we did a workshop

and I wrote down what had happened in my life. And I'd never written it before anywhere. I'd never really said it anywhere except for my therapist's office. And, you know, I told it to everyone, including the cast, they didn't really know either. And afterwards, this girl came up to me and said, essentially, me too. And that had never happened to me before. I had no one. And all of a sudden...

You never told any friends or... I mean, it's different. It is different to tell someone who you know knows what you're talking about. You don't even have to say it all. So I had that for the first time. But yeah, no, and it happens pretty often after shows, too, where girls will come up to me. That's a big responsibility for you.

Yeah, yeah. Is it sometimes too much? I definitely went through a phase where I was mad because I had never gotten to be that girl who had someone to go to. I had never gotten that. And all of a sudden, I was landed in the other seat of having to be that person for someone else

when I never got that. It was heavy. Did you ever push it away and say, you know what? Enough. I can't be that person for you all the time for a line of girls. No. You took it all on.

I did because I wanted them to have what I didn't get. I wanted that for them a lot. And the more I did it, the more I realized that actually it was serving a purpose for me too. And I mean, it's a privilege now. And one that I take really seriously and that I carry with me all the time. So I love those girls. I love them. even when they don't say anything,

even when they just don't know what to say, and they hug me, and they say, like, thank you. They don't have to say anything other than that. Because you already know. And I know, and they know. That's Mary Miller, who was a member of the cast and Katie Capiello, artistic director of Arts Effect,

and the director of Slut, The Play. We spoke in 2016. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Before we go today, we're going to take a little trip. Oh, well, I'm Ian Frazier, and we're going to 400 Ferry Street in Newark, New Jersey. Is this a turn?

The New Yorker's Ian Frazier is kind of an explorer. He's reported from the Rust Belt, from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and Siberia. And God knows where else. But today, he's just going a few miles from home. Well, I like to walk around. I walk all over wherever it is. I happen to find myself, but I live in suburban New Jersey, and from time to time I'll walk down into Newark.

It's seven miles or something from my house. And just walk around and look at stuff. You'll see abandoned buildings or buildings that are just nothing's happening there, and you wonder about them. There's so many of them. And when I heard that there was one of these buildings was going to be turned into a vertical farm that is a farm that uses space vertically,

just the way apartment buildings use space. That fascinated me. And it is different. It's different from rooftop farms. It's different from growing in an abandoned lot. Thanks for coming down. I hope you're coming down anyway. No, it's fine.

You're important. Okay. And besides, I like to see you. I'd like to see you too. That's Ed Harwood. He's an agricultural inventor. He's been an agricultural inventor for a long time. I'm the chief science officer at Aero Farms.

I invented the majority of the equipment that we're currently using in this facility to grow baby leafy greens. I admire inventors. I'm from Ohio. The Wright brothers are from Ohio. and Ohio actually has a museum of inventors. It has a Hall of Fame of Inventors.

My father was an inventor. He worked on plastics for Standard Oil of Ohio. What I admired about Ed Harwood was when I first looked at his grow table. It looked to me like the original Wright Brothers plane. And, you know, it's just, I think, just canvas and wood. And what they did with that is just staggering to me. And the name of the plane is the flyer. I think that's like the most beautiful name.

Like, flyer. That's like Ohio, you know. We keep it simple. And ingenious. So I was trying to remember, you know, when was the aha, when all they were, right? When does the aha happen? Yeah. Yeah, so Travis and I always had lunch at Wegmans in the balcony up above.

Weggmans is an East Coast grocery store chain. You can see the produce department. And Ed Harwood, he often had lunch there with his colleague, Travis, while they were working on a plan for growing lettuce indoors. That's the real aha that happened at that particular time, right? So we're thinking about growing heads. At first, they were talking about just heads of lettuce. And we're looking at a head of lettuce, one pound, one dollar.

And then we see a bag of lettuce, and it's less than a piece. pound in the bag, and it's like $8, $9. It doesn't take a whole lot of difference there to tell you don't want to be growing heads. That was a pretty big aha for us because then we switched totally. We stopped working on that whole other project and moved to this. So they decided that the crop they would grow would be baby salad greens, and the method they chose was aeroponics. This does not use soil. Aeroponics nourishes and waters plants by means of a mist, a sprays a mist on the roots. So what do you put the plants in? Ed also had to invent a growing medium, and that medium is a piece of cloth. But the cloth, you went to fabric stores over and over and over, and you're just

trying. And the Joanne Fabrics ladies were really helpful, except for, yes, and they would say, so what color do you want and what pattern do you want? And they would be very frustrated with that whole thing. But I tried just about everything. I mean, that's the fabric, right? It's a fleece, basically. The seeds are put on this fleece. They germinate.

Their roots go through and below the fleece, where they are available to be misted, and the leaves grow above the fleece, which holds the plant in place, and holds it upright. So let's see, let's start down. Let's just quickly walk down. So once he had the technology down,

he built a grow table 100 feet long in an abandoned canoe factory. And his grow table worked very well with very little water and no soil, and it was extremely portable. I mean, that's a key thing for vertical farming. It has to be light enough that you can stack the trays one on top of another.

So what we have in this vertical farm, the grow tables are about 80 feet long, and they're stacked seven beds high, and they are growing these baby salad greens. And if you look in, there are armies and armies of baby solid greens. It looks kind of like a lit up high-rise with veins of green running through in between the layers of lights. From a distance, it's the top of a cruise ship, right? all lit up at night or whatever. Yeah.

So there's a big tank reservoir that sits underneath the machine and we manage the nutrient solution and its BH and a bunch of other things in it to make sure that it's what the plants want. So from the pumps, it goes down some... Everything about the plants, everything that's important to their growth. Water, nutrients, light, are controlled and monitored by computer algorithms, which adjust everything minutely. At one point they told me it was like 170,000 data points

is what they're following. Because of this intense focus of technology on these humble greens, they can go from seed to harvest in 18 days. In that sense, it's pretty simple. What's actually going on is a little bit more complex. I don't think anybody imagines vertical farming as replacing conventional agriculture,

but it is an interesting accompaniment to it. Over the long haul, it appears that it will be more environmentally friendly than growing in a field. In the first place, it uses a tiny amount of the water that conventional agriculture uses. In the second place, you can put this farm anywhere, which means that you do not have to drive these salad greens for days and days to reach the market.

They use LED lights, and LED lights, it is a big expense, but the cost of LED lights goes down all the time, the efficiency of LED lights goes up all the time, and it looks as if this is going to be a very practical way of providing light to the growing plants. And about 5% of the physical mass of the plants is carbon, and the carbon comes from the air. It comes out of the air and it's in the supermarket.

Right. Tell me what the CO2 problem was because you told me that when you were first doing it and the plants were not working out that well, you wondered, wait a minute, how much CO2 are they getting? Yes. So I was growing in the basement of the canoe factory and I did not have any air coming in because I was trying to save money on heating the building and the rest of that. So I had it pretty well sealed up. Okay.

So that CO2 is depleted in that room as a result of the plants. And without any more coming back in, that level is going to go way down. So outdoors, we have about 400 ppm of CO2. And, yes. But I had driven it down to 50 ppm. At 50 ppm, there's not enough carbon to make more plant. So I had these little tiny plants. would just stay that way. They would not grow like anybody else's plants that I saw. And here we take

it to about a thousand ppm. Wow. So you do enrich here. Yes. Okay. We have it delivered by companies that make the CO2 from the air. So, you know, we kind of have this whole circle, cycle going, right? Yeah. I mean, it's certainly not a problem. Anybody thinks, well, we got not enough CO2, you know? And the carbon, does it only come from the air? Yes. So if you're taking a million pounds out of here, you're taking 50,000 pounds of carbon that was in the air. Yes. Simia is kind of incredible. And that we're eating carbon that comes out of the air and it's in the supermarket.

Ed Harwood had an idea to do this without anybody saying, you know, Ed, we need you to do this. He was just thinking about how could you solve this problem of growing plants indoors with the minimum amount of water in a way that could. be, that could fit inside a building. And it was just a problem that he set himself and actually solved. He pulls this plant out of, kind of out of thin air. He did something that was close to magical, just out of the love of doing it, really. And then it can be translated into this factory in Newark where factories came and went. And to me that's just, there's an elegance of it.

about that. What would you say is your most notable invention or what invention are you proud of stuff? Well, I'm very proud of figuring out how to grow in cloth. But there's sort of like a runner-up. I thought that we should be able to feed calves automatically. So this is my very first one, right? And I took a toilet and all the parts of a toilet to be able to automatically feed the calves. Okay, so I would fill up the toilet bowl with milk. All right, I had the plunger, so you go to the calf's bucket and you push the plunger, okay, and all of that's on a wagon. So it's very simple stuff, okay?

But in a way, those are the things that make you curious, and if you get rewarded slightly from doing it, then you continue to do these, you know, you continue to think that way, I guess. Did that calf feeder work out? I mean, was it something even? No one was pleased. with me going around outside and, you know, inside of everybody in Fort Collins with a toilet feeding cabs.

Okay. Okay, fine, but figure out some other word configuration. Yeah, much less elegant than what you've done. That was inventor Ed Harwood of Arrow Farms. He talked with Ian Frazier earlier this year. Fraser's written for the New Yorker for more than 40 years, and not long ago, he published a great collection of his reporting called Hogs Wild.

I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the show today. Next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we're going to be talking about how voting rights has become one of the most contentious issues on the political map, and I hope you'll join us for that. Till then, I hope you have a great weekend, although if you're going to be hitting some Halloween parties, don't have too great a time,

if you know what I mean. How do I get out of here? I can help you with that. Stumble downstairs in 20 feet. A cluster of smokers will be on your right. You will not feel like saying goodbye to more people. So, continue walking with your head down, because if your head is down, you are invisible, and therefore, not rude. As you exit, carry your jacket, because you are warm from alcohol, and too lazy to do all that complicated stuff with your arms.

Begin walking in the general direction in which you feel the subway station may be situated. In 100 feet, pull your phone out to look at a map. Make a slight detour to scroll through Twitter while standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Forget why you took your phone out. Continue walking. Depending on traffic, yield to crowds of other drunk people. They are different from you in tighter skirts and higher heels.

But in another sense, they are the same. You're all just trying to squeeze as much experience out of your youth as possible. In a sense, you're all just sailors on the sea of... Oh, one of them is throwing up. Fear right. In 500 feet, turn left into a bodega and proceed to wander aimlessly through the aisles for 10 minutes.

Pause to make prolonged eye contact with a bodega cat. Really feel a connection with the animal. Are you drunk enough to justify a cat? Mentally retrace your steps to figure out how many drinks you had. Once you figure out you had that many drinks, vaguely wonder if you did anything embarrassing at the party. Enter an endless loop of anxiety. In one minute, hail a cab. Keep the windows open.

GPS directions for getting home drunk was written by Hallie Cantor and performed by Susan Bennett, who is the actual voice of Siri. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riann & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix,

Michael Rayfield, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Sarah Sandbach, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.