How to Defend Yourself Playwright Hopes Show Gives 'Release' to Sexual Assault Survivors

Joan Marcus

Centered in humor, brutal honesty and healing, How to Defend Yourself is a play that explores what we want and how we can ask for it.

"After a sorority sister is raped, her cohort gathers to form a DIY self-defense class and explore the many components of self-defense as they deal with their own desires and rage and feelings and contradictions," explains Liliana Padilla, writer and co-director of the production.

They add, "We spend time with these characters as they get to know each other, and they perhaps come face to face with parts of themselves that they've tried to shove down or exile."

As a survivor of sexual assault, Padilla was not sure they wanted to write the play, but when faced with a time-sensitive assignment during a graduate school class at UC San Diego in 2016, they were "able to let go of the censor and just flow." Reflecting on the experience, Padilla is happy they chose to create this play.

"I felt very confined and alienated by lots of narratives that I was experiencing in media around sexual assault. It felt like there was just such a single story in that story that felt really narrow and entrapping," Padilla says. "In making the play, I wanted to create something that could be a vessel for so many aspects of the emotional experience of continuing on with life post-assault, including desire, including humor, including a lot of rage and proactivity and doubt."

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Joan Marcus

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While Padilla put pen to paper on their own, bringing the play to life required extra hands, including Tony Award–winning director Rachel Chavkin.

"First and foremost, as I'm thinking about projects in my mid-career, I'm thinking a lot about where and how I can leverage my positional power to elevate new voices," Chavkin says. "Liliana's just one of the most extraordinary writers we have working today."

Co-directing the play, Chavkin says, has been "a total joy": "I think I was really excited for the challenge and a very unique and different challenge from other ones that I've experienced in my career so far. These seven teenagers in the piece are trying to figure out a new way to be together, and it is hopeful and a beautiful thing."

Joan Marcus

To bring movement to the words of the play, Steph Paul was brought on as movement director and co-director alongside Padilla and Chavkin.

"Movement is a way in which we can process emotion. Movement represents freedom and possibility," says Paul, a New York–based director and choreographer. She adds about working alongside Padilla and Chavkin, "The beautiful thing about this collaboration is we all have different origin stories and starting points for how we look at work. For me, that's always my beginning: movement, music and rhythm."

In thinking about the message the play will send, Padilla is brought back to a quote from one of their professors at UC San Diego: "Every play you write liberates another part of you in the map of yourself."

"I think my deeper goal in writing this was to make contact with and free parts of myself that I had pushed down or hidden. So I hope that witnessing the play gives some sort of release and deeper access to themselves, to folks in the audience," says Padilla.

How to Defend Yourself runs through April 2 at the New York Theatre Workshop.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.