CHICAGO _ Anthony DiNicola ducked his head into his boss' office: Did she want a bottle of water? "Why, yes," Gail Stern replied, with a grand, winking flourish, "I mean, how did you ... "
"How did I know?" DiNicola said dramatically.
"Yes," she said, breathless.
"Well, it's as if you trained me ... "
"No," Stern broke in, rueful, "it's as if _ I felt entitled!"
"Let's not talk systems of privilege," DiNicola begged, "not now!"
"Of course not," Stern sighed, "never ... "
He left and she softly pulled her door closed and ... end scene.
On a recent morning, as the nation roiled with stories of sexual harassment and abuses of power occurring from Hollywood to county legislatures, as everyday people found themselves struggling to have meaningful discussions about accountability, patriarchy, non-consensual groping and non-binary gender dynamics, at Catharsis Productions in Chicago no conversation was too trivial to become a lesson on power and sexuality, and no conversation was too solemn to solicit a laugh. It's a smoothly theatrical, irreverent bunch. The role of the exploited subordinate was played by DiNicola, the company's senior educator; and the role of the entitled manipulator was played by Stern, one of Catharsis' co-founders. Theirs was a one-off show, an improvisation among colleagues.
Yet beneath that exchange was the role of Catharsis itself, which has never felt more prescient: For the past 17 years, with quiet momentum, the group has become one of the most sought after, and unlikely, sexual-assault prevention organizations in the country. What began as a theater company has become something quite complicated.
One with the ear of the U.S. military. And nearly every major college in the country.
"What this moment in time feels like to me," Stern said, seriously, "is that the rest of the world is finally wrestling with, and talking about, what we've been talking about for decades. We have friends and clients and everyone now, asking us: How did it come to this?" She smiled and sat back: "There are days I feel like the rape-explainer-in-chief."
Stern's like that.
Disarmingly direct _ at times to a fault, she admits. She casually refers to herself as "Dr. Feminist"; in a recent speech to Title IX college administrators, she introduced herself as "head witch of the feminist cabal of man-hating special snowflakes opposed to freedom of speech and all sexual gratification." She's been talking sexual-abuse awareness for so long, she explained, "I no longer feel a need to get preachy." Indeed, before starting Catharsis, first as a kind of theater group with actor Christian Murphy in 2000, Stern was working by day as director of the Campus Advocacy Network at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and by night as a stand-up comic. Her act, she said, was often about the tension she felt in those diverging roles, navigating the gulf between blunt comedian and rape counselor.
When she was 25, at the urging of a former police officer, she began providing cultural sensitivity training for the Chicago Police Department. "He told me, 'You understand the victim thing, so you're sensitive, plus you've got a comedy thing.' And I was like, 'You're high.' " She had never taught before, but she learned to go before several hundred officers and say: "Before I give you my talk on sensitivity, you should know I think you're a bunch of hypocritical bigots. You're racist, sexist, homophobic, backstabbing doughnut-eating, coffee-swilling, baton-clubbing, evidence-planting (jerks). You probably hate me because I'm a woman, I've got ... gay friends, I'm not a cop and if that's not enough, I'm also Jewish. By the time this course is over you're going to learn to kiss an officer of the same sex, hold his hand and recite poetry. You're going to learn the top five most important things to know about African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Women Who Love Too Much and Men Who Find Their Pets Attractive. You're going to eat quiche and like it." Twenty years later, she can still rattle it off in full.
The approach went so well _ "They sat in shock, then laughed" _ it lent a spark: Could she teach others to do something similar with sexual-harassment and abuse issues? Could she use the techniques of the stand-up comic _ framing an argument, playing with irony, maneuvering an audience into confronting its frailties _ to explain the role of bystanders in sexual violence? Or the difference between coercion and consent? "The problem with (prevention programs) has always been that they only deliver the punchline: 'Rape is wrong.' So you get guys sitting out there thinking, 'I'm no rapist. I don't even own a ski mask.' And they check out of the conversation. And so nothing is done to address power and entitlement _ to explain the cold calculations that institutions make when they're faced with harassment. Nothing is done to discuss the way that people talk about victims. Nothing to build intuitive meaningful connections between the audience and the rape culture they may support, indirectly or otherwise."
As Murphy put it: "Not once in 17 years has anyone come up to me and said, 'Until that show, I was on the fence about rape.' Yet that's where prevention often begins and ends." He and Stern sought, basically, a holistic twist on public service announcements.
Their idea _ in practice, a kind of crowd-sourced improv about gender and power, rooted in factual information and research, that didn't shy from emotion, or ideology, or even the occasionally complicit role of the institution hosting the talk _ provided the foundation for Catharsis. They now put on almost daily shows, about dating, sexual harassment, rape culture, victim blaming and being a bystander to abuse, performing at more than 250 colleges and universities around the country, from vast state institutions to tiny rural community classrooms. The Catharsis model is so popular the Army now requires new soldiers to sit through its presentations. Same at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Lake County, where Catharsis performs several times a week for new sailors.
"I can't say enough good things," said Kim Reese, former sexual assault response coordinator for the Great Lakes Naval Station (now in that position for the Navy's East Coast stations). "Great Lakes is such a young base, in terms of sailor's ages, and Catharsis talks to them in a way that's not boring, and relevant _ and never shaming."
"They've always made a lot of sense to me," said Jodi Caldwell, director of the counseling center at Georgia Southern University, where Catharsis performs annually for its 4,000 incoming freshmen. "Their work comes out of research, their shows adjust with new research. Our students have definitely become more proactive about (issues of) sexual assault since we've basically made (Catharsis) part of campus culture here."
Not that everyone loves them.
"Our motto is 'Fighting fire with funny' because 'Fighting fire with accessibility' doesn't sound as good," said Ben Murrie, Catharsis' contract and client relations director. But the line between using humor to make a point and appearing to make light of a serious (and litigious) subject can look thin at a skittish university. "There are shows when the students seem prepared for a light comedy act and you realize all your material is about consent and supporting survivors," DiNicola said. Not every school asks them to return.
"What makes Catharsis so unique is that they are willing to blend theater and comedy with some really hard truths about sexual violence," said Sarah Layden, director of programs and public policy for Chicago's Rape Victim Advocates support group. "They frame these topics in a way aimed at affecting cultural attitudes, but the reality is we have made a few basic (political and social) steps backward in this country, which means you have to bridge gaps to stuff that no one really wants to hear."
They are not fighting attitudes toward sexual harassment so much as commanding from the front lines. Still, after 17 years as a niche on the Chicago theater scene, Catharsis finds itself in a curious position, as one of the few organizations out there prepared to convert anger over ongoing sexual-abuse headlines into meaningful cultural change.
"We have an opportunity," Stern said. "The question is how we meet it? And what does it look like? There are a lot of terrified men, re-evaluating everything they've done in their lives. Were they wingman to a problem? Were they a problem? That fear calcifies growth and can keep you from being introspective, and I think we need to provide a safe environment for people to reflect on their behavior, like an amnesty for ignorance. Which is actually like stand-up: We all agree X is insane, so what are we going to do?"
Catharsis Productions is found in a second-floor corner office at the busy intersection of Milwaukee and Chicago avenues. The place is all blond wood and clean lines, a former Pilates studio converted into office space. It has 13 full-time staff and about twice as many performers, and if you knew nothing about Catharsis, a visit to its office would suggest ... tech start-up? PR business? That is, until you find its rehearsal space:
"Consent is not like Great America where you get a ticket and ride every ride," Heather Imrie, director of program development, is saying, preparing three new twentysomething performers. "Consent is closer to a carnival, where you need a ticket for every ride."
They sit at a desk, semi-circle around the front of the room. It's the second day of orientation, the middle of July, a month before some of the new recruits will be sent to perform in front of 200 and 300 college students at a time. They have a lot to cover still: holding men accountable, fear of retaliation, toxic cultures of silence, the myth of the false rape report. Cara Thaxton, one of the program developers, asks for "the magic formula for a slut," meaning the number of times you can have sex before you are one.
Three, a student says.
"Three comes up a lot," Imrie says, "But I would argue zero. It's not like anyone knows a person's history. There is no math where you go, 'One, two, three _ OK, we got a slut!"
They ask students why it's bad to blame the victim, then provide an illustration, picking line by line through a radio host's commentary about a rape and murder in New York. Imrie: "What does it infer that they stress these were suburban girls in the wrong place?"
Student: "Cities are dangerous."
Imrie: "Implying rapes never happen in rural areas or suburbs. True?"
Student: "No."
Thaxton: "What is 'city' code for?"
Student: "Urban, brown people."
Imrie: "Yes, and why did the reporter choose this story?"
Student: "To scare people."
Student: "To confirm stereotypes."
Imrie: "It's a Grimm's fairy tale. Woman wearing flashy clothes attracts predator wolf. Don't do that, you don't attract a wolf. Reality is, this happens mostly with someone ... "
Student: "... a victim knows."
Imrie: "Right, good."
It's a kind of gender-power-sexual-awareness boot camp that lasts for weeks, an information dump so dense with examples, and precise in its language, that Catharsis is basically asking recruits _ often young actors from Chicago, with an itch for social justice _ to become credible, confident authorities in less time than it takes to complete a course on these subjects. Then the performers (called "educators" in-house) are sent around the country, and the world, doing 40 shows or more a month, often learning on stage. They've performed at Yale and Harvard, Notre Dame and the Fashion Institute of Technology and Stanford, at military bases in Kosovo and South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. George Zerante, a trainer who says he's done thousands of shows for Catharsis, performed for Penn State fraternities, then the Penn State football team.
"The first time I did this (at the Naval Station), I was terrified," said Michael Turrentine, an Oklahoma native who joined Catharsis last year. He's part of the six-performer team that takes weekly Metra trains to the North Shore base. "I was this small guy in a sweater, but you learn fast. You get transphobic questions, and you shut them down, and a lot of these guys, they are not used to be called out by a civilian. Politics don't come up as much as you think, considering the president is their boss. You find they can separate some from where they are." Performers have learned, in military settings, to appeal to codes of honor and to pepper their conversations with military jargon.
"I taught one class, all male, that was very victim blaming, very 'why do we have to be here,' " Turrentine said. "Then this sailor stood and said, 'Sorry, I'm going to bring this down, but (sexual abuse) happened to me _ twice.' You got this deafening silence. So I pushed them: 'Why did everyone get quiet?' They weren't sure. It became a moment."
After shows, sexual-abuse survivors approach Catharsis performers so often that Zerante said, "You expect it." Abusers reveal themselves too. Imrie said: "I had a guy admit raping two women, a guy say he was stalking a woman, a woman say she abused a girlfriend." She said she tells performers: "You don't yell. You explain options and resources. 'Don't reach out for these folks to apologize, OK?' Get them to a place where they're not hurting anyone."
Back at orientation, Imrie told her students to shut down hateful speech, to get audiences to confront themselves: "Do they have internalized sexism blocking them? Do they see trans people as a group? But you're not blaming. This isn't shock and awe."
She stopped.
The room was quiet.
"It's a lot," Imrie said, "I get it."
