By adamg on Wed., 11/4/2015 - 3:49 pm
Erin Butcher, artistic director of Maiden Phoenix Theatre Company explains why performing in Somerville's Powder House Park means she will never do all-female outdoor performances again:
Vaguely, in the back of my head I must have known that a few homeless fellows would populate a public park in summer every now and then. But I really didn’t think much of it. I would be there every day anyway if there were any problems, and I had very rarely ever been approached by any homeless people in Somerville in my 4 years of living there… so it would be fine….
It was not fine. ...
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The island is still there
By Markk02474
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 12:52am
Just harder to get to and facilities closed.
Sheltered snowflakes need to learn coping skills should they ever leave this island of Political Correctness, get on a plane and visit a country where men are really agressive.
You need to stop giving advice
By lbb
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:45am
And you need to practice SHUTTING THE HELL UP a whole lot about what other people should do in situations that you will never face. Starting now. Just shut the hell up and stay that way for a good long while.
Listen
By boo_urns
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 1:27pm
Just because it's worse elsewhere doesn't mean this is acceptable behavior here.
Conduct Sensitivity Trainings for Homeless Men
By Markk02474
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:26pm
alcoholics, and drug addicts then. If you apply for a federal grant, you just might get funded.
Train 'em all you want
By Roman
Wed, 11/04/2015 - 10:53pm
you'll find that the ones that need to be trained are the ones that can't learn. What is one to do?
Lock up all the drunks, addicts, and vagrants, you say? I'm up for that. There's even a term for this vague concept you're formulating: Broken Windows.
Michael,
By anon
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 6:27pm
they are hardcore druggies, alcoholics, homeless, and most likely mentally ill, not surprisingly, their behavior is erratic and can be rude and scary. Attempting to 'educate' them like college freshmen or in an HR orientation class will not work. They are not representative of healthy, well adapted adult males.
Seriously?
By Hgm
Wed, 11/04/2015 - 11:06pm
I totally sympathize BUT for the organizer not to anticipate this is incredibly ignorant and foolish. Seriously, where does the hell does she think she lives? Kansas? It was her responsibility to hire private security guards in order to ensure the safety of those participating was guaranteed. This is just the world you live in, crime and vagrancy happens, especially in a public park in a large metro area. It's just hard to bellies that anyone would be surprised by this. My advice to the organizer is; stop living in a bubble!
Lots of hate in this thread
By LN
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 7:13am
I thought the writer told her story in a pretty honest and descriptive way. Unlike seemingly every other commenter here, I did not get the sense that she was trying to shove some agenda down my white male throat.
I mean, she's not saying that these men should be kicked out of the park, or sent to feminist reeducation camp. Her conclusion is that she should be more conscious of how she programs theater and conducts her job/life. She is a lot less pissed off than I would be.
Even if she is some "liberal bubble child," at least she is learning and growing from her experiences, which is seemingly more than can be said about some of the people leaving comments after reading (?) the article.
Hmm.
By Sally
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 8:13am
Her takeaway is pretty much "I am never doing this again!" I'd be more impressed, I guess, if she found a way around it. If you have the guts to do all-women's theater then surely you could be more prepared to tackle issues like this. Any 1970s feminist collective worth its salt would've found some forceful women to run security of sorts (probably a couple of rugby players would go the trick). There's a weird, very modern combination here of "hear me roar" and "we are fundamentally unable to protect ourselves" against what seems like not terribly egregious or unpredictable behavior by a bunch of sad, drunk guys. I can't really believe that the only solution was to call in the boyfriends.
Yes, 70s women grew up having
By BUMP
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:22am
Yes, 70s women grew up having to deal with unfriendly and threatening men from an early age. A girl needn't leave the house to learn that the world contained creeps. Before caller ID, just picking up the phone introduced a girl to anonymous obscene harassing men. Not being chauffeured to school, or even to the bus stop, meant that children explored their neighborhoods by walking, often receiving offers of rides from strangers. The sheltered lives today's young people lead have not prepared them well in the practice of street smarts. And young women, especially, would benefit in a crash course on the subject when they leave for college.
Yes! Those of us growing up
By Patricia
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 10:15am
Yes! Those of us growing up in the 70's did have to deal with much more. I remember cars of men whistling and honking at us walking to school, and this was 7th grade! Some cars would actually stop and I remember one time a car full of men stopping and the car doors started opening.
We knew the drill and managed to keep ourselves safe.
great point.
This is all depressingly true.
By Sally
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 2:16pm
You took so much more creepy behavior for granted--flashers, public masturbators, cat callers, obscene mutterers and yellers. In seventh grade I had a guy try to lure me into his car while I was waiting for a friend to go to school and then when I demurred and started to walk away, he got out and started to follow me, at a run. I bolted up the street to where there were a few people around but holy hell--scary. Never told my parents or anyone.
Is there a point in all this?
By lbb
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 3:34pm
It was sooo much worse in the 70s, and it;'s soooo much worse today under ISIL, and yahda yahda yahda. Listen to yourselves, for God's sake. You're acting as apologists for shitty, barbaric, dehumanizing behavior on the lame-ass excuse that it's worse somewhere else. Since when does "it sucked worse then/it sucks worse somewhere else" excuse bad behavior? Was that how you were brought up? Tell me, if you misbehaved, did you ever once get off the hook by telling your mom about something your brother did that was much worse?
This stupid "it used to be worse/it is worse elsewhere" pseudo-argument is the kind of lame excuse that little children try (and generally fail) to excuse their misbehavior. Chronological adults should know better. Grow up.
Nobody is "acting as an apologist"
By anon
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 6:03pm
The point being made is that there was a time when women grew up with an awareness of this type of scumbag behavior. Ergo they were more equipped to deal with it. It is less the case today where a certain demographic of women are being brought up in an oversheltered manner and react the way the author of the article reacted.
Grow up?
By Sally
Fri, 11/06/2015 - 4:10am
That's rich coming from you, queen of the online tantrum. Please feel free to point out where anyone excuses the behavior of the men in this instance except to observe that they are not college boys or construction workers but exactly the kind of creepy, addled losers you'd expect to find hanging out 24/7 in a city park. It's not that the harassment doesn't suck but they should have been more prepared to deal with it--it's the surprise that's puzzling folks here. Any theater company who performs in a public arena less genteel than say Tanglewood shouldn't be surprised by unwanted attention of all varieties--any Elizabethan would tell you as much.
I've read her whole post. Oh my.
By BUMP
Sat, 11/07/2015 - 12:28pm
Yes, nobody is excusing the bad behavior of others. If anything, the Maiden Phoenix director's fear was UNKNOWINGLY encouraging it. Those men were sadists.
Those men were getting off on her fear. One sounds like he was having a blast regaling her with stories of bar fights and violence. She was frightened so much that she fell into the old "damsel in distress" mode: "I even started to flirt with him". She wrote, "How humiliating!" She better not call herself a feminist. She fell back on the only power she believes that she has, her "feminine wiles."
Little does she know, like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, she is smart, lovable, brave, and has tons of power within herself and needs to realize it. If that man had seen that she was not afraid of him, his fun would have been over and he would have eventually gone off somewhere else, unless he was a Shakespeare fan.
By declaring "I'll never perform in public again," she has surrendered her power to them.
She has just as much right to use that public space. Instead, she cowered in fear, playing right into their sadistic scaring tactics. She ought to stop apologizing for her existence and start to own the space she occupies, wherever she is, at every moment of every day of her existence.
She gave her power away. Who has more power? She and 15 white, upper middle class, law-abiding citizens? Or the loitering, drinking and drugging in public threatening and harassing men?
She should change her theater company to the Amazon Phoenix Players, take lots of cameras next summer, and go on with the show.
These are tenets from 2nd Wave Women's Liberation of the 1970s, that out of date feminism that 3rd wave feminists love to mock. Let them mock them. Let them call their boyfriends for protection when they want to put a play in the park.
Folks, please read the comments on the linked blog post too
By Ron Newman
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 8:59am
some of which were written by actors in this production. Listen to them. They aren't making this up.
No one thinks they're making it up.
By Sally
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 2:22pm
Only that it's not surprising. Somerville isn't Bennington. I just don't know how you do outdoor theatre in a city without expecting obstacles like this. I'm thinking of Tony Roberts in Annie Hall (explaining why he left New York) "I did Shakespeare in the Park. I got mugged." It's not that it's right but public theater is almost by nature confrontational and has to deal with its surroundings. If you do theater in the woods, you may have bats and wandering deer. If you're in Somerville...this.
Or perhaps "Exit, chased by a bear" for real?
By Ron Newman
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 5:01pm
Ha!
By Sally
Fri, 11/06/2015 - 2:08pm
One of my formative memories of my teenaged life in Boston was being chased through the Combat Zone/Chinatown by a tall, scraggly, completely crazy guy, wearing one of those olive green coats with the coyote fur around the hood, who seemed to think I was an ex-girlfriend of his named Debbie. I will never forget the spooky hidden face and his careening after us shouting "I KNOW IT'S YOU, DEBBIE!"
The amount of mansplaining on this post
By CraigInDaVille
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:13am
is just sad.
What's worse...
By lbb
Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:46am
...is that some of it is coming from women (or so we are told) who have clearly been very well indoctrinated.
Yes, clearly.
By Sally
Fri, 11/06/2015 - 3:56am
Any woman who holds an opinion different from yours has clearly been "well indoctrinated" by the patriarchy. Because we're all so pliable and ladylike around here--wouldn't dream of thinking for ourselves.
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