Three actors dressed in black appeared from behind a curtain at center stage while Jason Derulo’s charmingly upbeat saxophone sample from his hit single “Talk Dirty to Me” blared through speakers.
“Hey baby,” “I’d tap that,” “How you doin?” “Got a smile for me,” the actors yelled at Wednesday evening’s audience in the University Student Union Beach Auditorium, setting-off the hour-long program on catcalling titled “Dirty Talk.”
“It’s a multifaceted piece,” Director Shaheen Vaas said. “There’s a lot of different opinions and perspectives and hopefully you’re listening to them all and come away with a little bit of that.”
The three-person show is based on live interviews and aims to confront sexual assault on college campuses, according to theatre company World Kin Ensemble’s website.
The docudrama’s theme went beyond portraying sexual assault as a women-centric issue and featured a plethora of characters including a rape survivor, a transgender man, an Orthodox Jewish woman, an ex-fraternity member and a political science professor—just to name a few.
Vaas said that she thought it was difficult to find a balance between women and men who experience sexual assault when there is such a large focus on women and sexual assault.
“A lot of men didn’t necessarily have a story of assault to tell,” Vaas said. “They certainly had times when they felt demeaned or objectified and that resonated very strongly with the women’s stories.”
Several of the monologues involved stories from the perspective of a man. In one, a man watched a woman force herself on another man and the contradicting feelings he felt when he did not do or say anything to stop it.
One in five women are sexually assaulted in college according to a report from the National Institute of Justice. Among men, the self- reported rates of sexual assault victimization and perpetration are very low.
Of the men interviewed for the piece, most wanted to address how they were pushed into catcalling and how they eventually went from bystanders to allies, Vaas said.
The ensemble recently shifted from a three-woman show to a two-women and one-man show. Vass said that the panel hoped to reach the men in the audience and rid the bias naming the issue as women-centric.
After the performance there was an interactive panel with Vaas and actors Melissa Macedo, who had a hand in producing the piece, Tess Neidermeyer and Mark P. Harris.
Over 100 people attended the performance, and about 20 people stayed for the panel, which went from feedback and questions to an open discussion on sexual assault and the best methods to prevent it.
“I have people that I know who went through this stuff so I wish they came to see it,” sophomore child development major at CSULB Leah Perez said.
Vaas grew up in India, citing the New Delhi gang rape in 2012 as a critical inspiration for the docudrama.
“I don’t understand why sexual assault exists,” sophomore human development major at CSULB Alisha Hedrick said. “It’s man-made. Well, not ‘man’ made.”
The World Kin Ensemble provides students with information on how to intervene before sexual assault occurs, how to speak out against stereotypes and attitudes that perpetuate sexual violence and how to support survivors.
“There’s something really strong in having faith in our general population that if there’s something wrong and you draw attention to it people will look around,” Neidermeyer said during the panel. ”People will be there.”
The next performance of “Dirty Talk” will take place at Loyola Marymount University on April 21.