John Jay College
SEEING RAPE Performance (2022)
Read more on this year's Seeing Rape: https://www.seeingrape.com/
Seeing Rape is a performance written by John Jay College students. This group of men and women playwrights represent sexual violence in their own words, dialects and languages in engaging and novel ways. In short plays, the way rape intersects with hyper-masculinity, the opioid epidemic, the work place, immigration at the Southern border, and dating will be examined through drama.
Seeing Rape performances are the dramatic results of the course “Sex, Gender, and Justice: Seeing Rape,” taught by Professors Shonna Trinch and Barbara Cassidy. The plays are all treated as works of fiction even though several are based on real-life, personal situations.
“Students spend a semester reading, writing and discussing representations of rape that many of them have never confronted before,” said Professor Trinch. “In their final class projects, students attempt to represent sexual violence in a multi-perspectival way that humanizes perpetrators, bystanders and of course, victims.”
Trinch says the plays are critiqued and questioned, with students doing several rewrites until they are ready for the professional actors. “It’s always so interesting to see the final product on the stage, because the audience probably has no idea how much work went into getting each play and the entire production to show time.”
