NPX Weekly RoundUp: revelations from the first and last ever rehearsal of THEY SAY I DID SOMETHING BAD: an unauthorized taylor swift parody musical about the life of the unabomber...by Courtney Taylor

A reality-breaking play about the horrors of grooming and sexual violence, plus three other plays I discovered this week.

Content warnings for discussions of grooming and sexual violence, rape culture, and far right BS.

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It continues to amaze me that theatre artists, and artists in general, persist in finding new and revelatory ways to discuss the same themes and messages over and over again. Amaze in a good way! That’s the beauty of art— unique individuals and/or ensembles find visionary ways to continue the conversations started long ago by artists we have never met, but share a spiritual, almost ancestral, connection to through art.

I’ve read and seen many plays and watched many movies that tackle the subject of sexual violence, and none express their message in the exact same way. For example: You have stories like the horror movie Jennifer’s Body that discusses rape as well as Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned To Drive that discusses childhood sexual assault, both of which are speaking about a similar theme in drastically different ways. One uses the literal violence of a demonic succubus to discuss how the violence of an assault continues to affect the victim long after the incident. One is based in realism, slowly revealing the truth of the relationship between a girl and her uncle through their various driving lessons. Both accomplish a very similar task— to show how exactly sexual violence continues to affect the victim post-assault.

As they say, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”! (A phrase I dislike due to the implications of violence on a cat, but fits well for our purposes here.)

Courtney Taylor’s play, revelations from the first and last ever rehearsal of THEY SAY I DID SOMETHING BAD: an unauthorized taylor swift parody musical about the life of the unabomber ted kaczynski presented by the bridgebrook college drama club joins the ranks of works that effectively discuss this issue (particularly grooming) in their own revelatory way.

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

Riley, an edgy playwright in love with her closeted best friend Cheyenne, creates an unruly new musical about the Unabomber – written after the arrest of the high school teacher who groomed her. The piece takes a surreal turn with the arrival of Ecoterrorist Taylor and the Unabomber, forcing Riley and Cheyenne to search for connection and tenderness at the end of the world.

revelations... is a 70-minute dramedy about college theatremakers, true crime, and rape culture, also ft. queer romance, Ecoterrorist Taylor, musical performances, and the end of the world.

This play starts out in a world a lot of you reading this are probably familiar with: that of the undergraduate college theatre department. The wacky antics, naively pretentious artistic conversations, and drama of a will-they-won’t-they couple are all something we’ve experienced in some capacity in this environment, and Taylor (lol) uses these universal experiences to create a snappy and hilarious part one. While there are many serious things discussed in the first part as well (mostly by Cheyenne trying desperately to get Riley to discuss the recent arrest of her groomer), I found myself laughing more often than not. It’s very clear to the audience that Riley and Cheyenne have chemistry; what’s not clear is how it will all play out, especially with Riley’s high school trauma being brought so close to the surface.

The funniest thing about part one was how utterly ridiculous the premise is. I mean, come on, a Taylor Swift parody musical about the unabomber? The ethical pitfalls are obvious! But Riley doesn’t care about that, justifying her artistic decisions with pseudo-pretentious theatre language that Cheyenne struggles to dig through. And that’s where a lot of the humor comes from in my opinion— that this idea is so utterly ridiculous on the face of it, but Riley is still trying to find ways to justify it and make it not problematic as hell. What’s really effective for me is that this source of humor is also the source of a lot of pain for Riley. It’s pretty clear that this play is Riley’s way of attempting to work through the trauma of being groomed in high school by her teacher, and Cheyenne is trying desperately to get her friend to see this. Riley reacts very realistically in my opinion, which is to say she and Cheyenne fight about this throughout the rehearsal. The audience feels for both characters.

Once Riley makes the decision that maybe this play shouldn’t go forward, reality seems to split. We enter a space that seems to be Riley’s mind, showing everything from her artistic thoughts on the unabomber play to her sexual fantasies, to her trauma. These things are manifested, hilariously, by Ecoterrorist Taylor and the actual unabomber himself, Ted Kaczynski (and when I say Ecoterrorist Taylor, I don’t mean she fights for the environment— exactly the opposite).

These manifestations of Riley’s psyche do everything short of jumping into the audience and losing their minds. They threaten to kill the girls, they make out with each other, and then— when the voice of Riley’s abuser manifests— they threaten to kill the “pedo” too. They are violent, manic, and absolutely nonsensical, creating a sense of humor but also tension and danger.

But what really struck me as a reader was a monologue in part three, given by Cheyenne, that shatters the fourth wall. At almost the end of the play, Cheyenne comes forward and discusses real life events that inspired the play. Events, it seems, from the playwright’s life. She says, quote:

I’m Cheyenne in the play and I’m Courtney writing the play and I’m right near Taylor Swift, except she’s not Taylor Swift.

This hits really hard after a page long monologue where Cheyenne discusses a teacher, “Mr. Redacted”, at a high school “Redacted High School”, doing exactly what Riley’s teacher had done to her, but to the playwright. Cheyenne goes on, mentioning more inappropriate behavior from male teachers, and finally settling on a graduate professor who “broke her brain”, once again implied to be the experience of the playwright. It’s a moment of extreme vulnerability, of heartbreaking courage, a part of the work that I’m sure the playwright as well as the actor playing Cheyenne would feel very protective over. It takes the play from the hypothetical theatrical space and into the real world. It’s jarring, but incredibly necessary. This isn’t a fictional conversation we are having here, it’s a real one. It’s one that happened to multiple people in the room, statistically.

So while hypothetically these events seem disconnected perhaps or messy, or maybe “disjointed”, these transitions from theatrical reality to mind-land to real-reality serve to show the audience exactly what is at stake: the lives of innocent people.

What this play showcases, at least for me, is the necessity to follow the thread/idea to it’s very end. By this, I mean that no matter how “insane” the story seems to get as you write it, you owe it to yourself (and the story) to follow it until the end. A lot of plays and playwrights suffer from trying to stop the play before it gets “wacky”, “convoluted”, or “messy”. What they lose when they do that is sometimes the heart of the play. The whole point of theater isn’t necessarily to showcase reality, to put a life on stage and have you contemplate it. It’s to tell a story— and sometimes that’s going to get messy. Sometimes, that’s the whole point.

When the rehearsal for the unabomber musical ends, we leave reality and enter Riley’s psyche. It’s weird, it’s strange, and it’s absolutely necessary to showcase the play’s meaning. If Taylor had stopped herself before that point, or tried to make the scene more “realistic”, the plot would have been essentially lost. We owe it to ourselves as playwrights to follow the thread, no matter the worlds it takes us through.

Here’s my official recommendation on NPX:

Somehow a play that tackles themes of grooming and sexual violence made me laugh out loud as I read it. This play perfectly balances humor and grief, pain and laughter. As a graduate of a college theatre department, I saw myself and a lot of my friends in Riley and Cheyenne, which brought a comforting sense of nostalgia to the piece that is ultimately shattered (rightly) by the reality of sexual trauma. Wacky and heartbreaking, hilarious and absolutely necessary. Much <3 to Courtney Taylor.

Have you read or seen this play? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Here are three other plays that I discovered and added to my library this week:

• La Llorona by Cecelia Raker

• Arsonist by Jacqueline Goldfinger

• Spatial Awareness by Anastasia Wild

Have a play you want me to read? Even, perhaps, your play? Reply to this email or send me a message on SubStack and I’ll add it to the list!

Happy reading!

~Brynn