NPX Weekly Round-Up: PSYCHOPSYCHOTIC, or, everyone at yale is a goddamn sociopath !!! by Alexa Derman

A fantastic metaphor for rape culture in college spaces, plus a few more plays I'm excited to read this week.

I know, I just posted this one on last week’s list of plays that intrigued me, but after seeing the title for this one I couldn’t not read it immediately. In this way I’ve already learned something about playwriting before even reading this play— a good title really does hook people.

As someone who always loved school and being a student (who also is a teacher), I love reading plays that analyze all the good and bad things inherent in educational spaces. This play tackles something incredibly important that all feminine presenting people already know: colleges and universities are hotbeds of sexual assault.

Before we get too into it, here’s the summary from NPX:

Something is amiss at Yale University. Female students are disappearing at alarming rates, only to be later found stuffed in discount mini-fridges and hacked to pieces. Meanwhile, a new freshman is pretty sure there’s something up with the guy she met at the campus bar last night...

If you’re a fan of true crime, this probably caught your eye immediately. Another lesson in hooking your audience before they even read your play!

I think it’s probably pretty evident from the summary and what I’ve already said, but just in case, here are some content warnings for this piece: discussions of sexual assault, discussions of murder and torture, depictions of maiming, implied cannibalism, and use of a gun.

This play is what I would call “darkly humorous” in that it has moments of hilarity but definitely no moments that I would call “light” in any way. We begin with an awkward conversation between a girl and boy walking home from the bar. They are both students at Yale, and it becomes clear that while the boy is maybe not the most socially aware, the girl is into him. They sleep together, and then it is revealed: this boy is keeping another girl in his closet, slowly cutting off parts of her and eating them.

This serves as a metaphor for what the play is really about— sexual assault of women and femmes on college campuses to a staggering degree; and how patriarchy, misogyny, and rape culture slowly eat at women, taking parts of us bit by bit. The serial killer’s disgusting methods are just a large exaggeration of what happens to billions of women and femmes every single day as we navigate a world that ranges from neutral to full out hatred towards us. It’s a masterful use of allegory.

I think when a lot of us picture an “allegory”, we think of the example often given to us (or at least to me) in middle and high school— The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. As a kid this made me think that all allegories were biblical for some reason (ah, the ignorance of youth), so discovering more and more works that use allegory in this way is very eye opening. Extended metaphors can be really effective ways to discuss complex and/or political topics, especially if they are subjects that certain groups of people have a difficult time understanding due to their specific experiences. An allegory sure does have a way of forcing someone to see how something feels, and this work does so by taking normally invisible emotions and making them physical and visceral.

Derman also utilizes three specific satirical scenes to discuss college and university’s response to rampant sexual assault and harassment (or lack thereof…), that definitely stood out to me as funny in a “I’m laughing because it’s true and also oh my god this is fucked up” kind of way. There are two scenes in which the actors portray “sexual health/sexual misconduct training” videos where they say things such as:

“…our recent decision to reopen our investigation of allegations against DKE! Fifth time’s the charm!”

(For those not in the know, DKE is a fraternity).

If you’ve been to college in the past decade, you know that, unfortunately, frat houses tend to be a hotbed of sexual assault and harassment. However, few colleges have actually done anything about this, hence Derman’s calling out of Yale investigating DKE five times without really doing anything.

These satirical “videos” and a third scene (which contains emails reminiscent of the ones we all got every time a sexual assault was reported) serve to shove a very important issue to the forefront of the audience’s minds: that college and universities care more about maintaining image than they do about protecting women and femmes on campus.

Can you tell I went to a college where sexual assault was a HUGE problem? Looking at you Gettysburg College!

Anyways…truly, the vibes in this play, the atmosphere, the very intentional feeling scene titles and pacing, were just immaculate. This is a work that is truly inspiring me to continue working on my own horror-adjacent piece! I think this will be one I reread in order to continue learning from this fantastic example of pacing and allegory usage.

Here’s my official recommendation from NPX:

A masterful use of allegory/extended metaphor, pacing, and atmosphere that beautifully calls out colleges for not doing enough to protect their women, femme, and AFAB students. I absolutely adore works that use horror as a tool to unveil the visceral, and yet sometimes invisible, experiences that women and femmes go through, and Psychopsychotic does this very intelligently. I would love to see this staged!

If you read this play, let me know what you think of it by replying to this email or messaging me on the SubStack app! I want to hear from YOU :)

Here are three other plays tickling my fancy this week:

• Bear Baiting by Anna Tatelman

• 1918 by Alaina Tennant

• Bad in Bed (A Fairy Tale) by Karen Saari

Want me to read one of these plays? Or, perhaps, you want me to read YOURS? I’d love to! Reply to this email or message me on SubStack and I’ll put your suggestion on the list.

Have a great week!

~Brynn