SURVIVORS
The setting is a therapist’s office in 1986; the real locale is the mind of Billie, a victim of incest. Terrified of what she can’t face (“It’s all my fault”), Billie suffers from headaches, insomnia, and unprocessed anger. Not knowing why, she alienates her friends, resenting their easy happiness. She hates being touched, loathes men and sex (“They get angry and fuck”). The thought of marriage repels her (“I can’t mate in captivity”). Bitterly she contrasts her life to the movies, where no one ever suffers alone and no pain is ever pointless. Her job, as an editor of a journal on sanitation engineering, seems irrelevant. She eerily describes going to a zoo’s primate house: seeing the drooping, sore dugs of the female monkeys, she wonders, what male rage to destroy did this to them–and to her?
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Like Brian Kirst’s 1991 Perished (a more poetically abstract treatment of the same subject), Survivors goes beyond story telling to let other survivors know they’re not alone. (That urgency excuses the occasional repetition, stock defensiveness, and overwriting.) Raw and rewarding, George Tafelski’s staging is as compassionate as it is painful.
