Sexual Assault. It’s a difficult topic to discuss without making people uncomfortable in everyday conversation. Yet that’s exactly what this performance was all about. Five people, sitting in chairs, facing the audience and talking honestly about their experiences.
Fired Up: Survivors of Trauma, HOPE and Change, took place on Nov. 6 in the SMSU Theatre. Written by prevention activist, Cordelia Anderson, the performance featured five cast members speaking about their personal experiences with child sexual abuse.
The play was powerful in its simplicity. As Anderson told the audience before it began, these people were not actors, they were real victims, sharing some of their most personal memories with those in attendance. Some had seen loved ones and relatives harmed by sexual abuse, but most had been victims of it themselves. Had it been a reenactment, it might have bordered on sentimental, or made the audience feel uncomfortable. However, the simple presentation, and the almost detached telling of something so heartbreakingly emotional, really added impact to the words.
Cast members included Chris Stark, Guadalupe Lopez, Tim Hammond, Michael Frear, and Stacey Chambers. Their stories interwove seamlessly, with one person or another standing to tell their part. At one point, Hammond and Frear, who had similar stories about being abused as boys, switched back and forth with memories that mirrored each other. Chambers accented their stories by playing the drum. Projected behind them were works of art by Stark, inspired by her experience. Frear started the performance off by singing, and Lopez ended it with another song.
The main focus of the play was to spread awareness about child sexual assault, and to encourage prevention as well: “No more victims, no more perpetrators,” was a line from the performance.
What kind of things can we do to stop this from happening? A point emphasized was that children need to understand what constitutes abuse. One of the stories told of the narrator as a young girl, being touched by another girl, her neighbor. She didn’t know that that kind of touching was unacceptable.
Another means of prevention is holding organizations, not just people, accountable. In Frear and Hammond’s stories, one was abused as a young boy by his Boy Scout leader, the other by his Choir Director. Yet even when they came forward, and it came to light that these men had done the same to many other boys, their respective organizations came to their defense.
The play ran well over an hour, but there was never a dull moment, nor did it ever get too sentimental. As the title suggests, it inspired audience members to get fired up and work towards ending child sexual abuse forever.