The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias
Opening Night: September 10, 2017
Closing: September 23, 2017
Theater: Duke on 42nd Street
From the company that brought you The Wolves, comes a new world premiere. When Grace B. Matthias is raped, her world spirals into chaos. Between navigating emotionally unstable guidance counselors, overbearing lawyers, an angry championship football team, and useless Wikipedia answers, Grace tries to make sense of her world anew. A complex collision of satire and dark comedy, The Rape of the Sabine Women, By Grace B. Matthias fearlessly explores rape culture in America. Written by Michael Yates Crowley and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, this world premiere was developed as part of The Realm’s Writing Fellowship in the 2014-2015 season.
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September 10, 2017
Only one of the title characters in “The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias” — a new play by Michael Yates Crowley — is a living human. She is Grace, a teenager in a generic Springfield where the football team reigns and “weird” girls get called pigs with impunity.
But the ancient Sabines have equal billing. Memorialized in myth and in the painting “The Intervention of the Sabine Women” by Jacques-Louis David, they are here to remind us, through the story of their abduction by Roman warriors and their peacemaking during the ensuing war, of the long and almost foundational role of rape throughout history.
If Mr. Crowley has set out to write nothing less than a treatise on rape culture, now and forever, he wants his play, which opened on Sunday in a Playwrights Realm production at the Duke Theater, to be so much more. A serious effort to dramatize a rape and its repercussions, it also dares itself to be a satire, a high school comedy and a coming-of-age story in which victimization is turned into strength through insight.
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