[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Grape Culture, written and performed by Toni Nagy and Sarah Buckner at Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024.
Grape Culture is an astounding show and certainly not your usual light entertainment. It’s about rape for one thing and also about our collective lack of introspection on something that affects not only the female half of the population, but also men, some very directly.
Seems odd then that we don’t talk about it every single day. But then that’s how deep the denial goes.
This incredible show mixes comedy, dance, film and clowning to tell this riveting story and all these techniques combined take it all to another level entirely. These two actors are relentless in this high-octave expose of what is considered ‘okay’ in our culture. This is not just about the experiences of these two phenomenal women, but a questioning of the horribly pervasive programming of everyone to look away, to minimize and to ultimately allow rape and rapey behavior.
In the younger generations, this is much more talked about. I know I have had many conversations with my daughter, in her twenties, where she has called me out on the minimizing of sexual abuse. It sounds bad, doesn’t it? But I’m talking about what used to be considered “bad behavior” and is now quite rightly a crime. Looking back I know I have been assaulted at the very least and I still think about it as if I had done something wrong. There are just so many of us.
This show is such an incredibly visceral relentless ride. It’s almost like deprogramming. It’s tough to watch some of it without squirming and yet you absolutely cannot look away. These two incredible performers are driven and brave and utterly beautiful in their total commitment to this subject. They change on stage over and over again, desensitizing us to the striping and reclothing, appearing to be almost naked at times, both physically as well as emotionally. As they tell their stories and force us to face the effects of decades and centuries and millennia of rape culture. And this is not subjective. Rape is a weapon used to deny rights, control people, dehumanize, delegitimize and degrade. There are also far more subtle forms. Ones that are excused away lest it upset someone. Ridiculous right? But it’s all around us every single day.
Why make a Hollywood Fringe show about this? And why create a show that exposes these two fine actors so completely over and over again? To make us face the brutality of it. The casual and persistent continuation of a behavior that should be abhorrent in every conceivable way but that we barely even talk about. It’s a dirty little secret that isn’t little and is definitely not a secret.
What better reason could there be to write a show about something that is so directly affecting all of us all of the time. It’s on our phone, on our TV, on the bus, driving in the car beside us and sometimes it’s in our bed.
I don’t think I have ever seen a show that has been so deliberately triggering. Or so appropriately inappropriate. Grape Culture should be on everyone’s must-see list at Fringe and in every school and in every workplace and at every college and university campus. Nothing will ever really change unless we are all made to deal with our misplaced sense of shame and our deeply trivialized pain.
Toni Nagy and Sarah Buckner are my heroes. They took a subject we would all rather not talk about let alone see a play about and totally blew it up. This is not remotely narrative in nature. This is a no-hold barred, in-your-face, incredibly effective, often funny, always shocking piece of performance art. By the end of the show, Toni Nagy and Sarah Buckner are physically and emotionally exhausted. They have given everything and the result is absolutely stunning. Bravo is too small a word. This is spectacular theatre. Meaningful purposeful unmissable Fringe.
There are two more performances:
Saturday, June 29 at 5:00 PM
Sunday, June 30 at 12:30 PM
Where:
Broadwater (second stage) 6320 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood.