REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
The show’s physicality is its own kind of poetry: combative, well-choreographed, and unrelenting. Director Elizabeth Broeder creates a space where every gesture counts, where each sparring session risks tipping into revelation. Maren Maclean Mascarelli’s fight and intimacy coordination bring startling immediacy even to the most comic moments, including the hip-thrust maneuver that transforms assault into escape in a single muscular beat. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also an act of survival.
For all its physical punch, the play’s deepest wounds are psychological. Locker-room banter, confessions and unsettling humor are as disarming in their honesty as they are frustrating in their confusion. Characters discuss masturbation habits with the same casual ease as missed classes. At times, it feels like overhearing an unfiltered group chat come to life. The dialogue overlaps, stumbles, and interrupts itself. This is how people in pain, or pretending not to be, actually talk.
...it’s buoyed by a cast that pulses with commitment and complexity. Christine Ward as Brandi brings grounded empathy. “Repeat after me,” she orders the class. “I am a fighter!” Meghan Ramos as Diana and Angelica Saario as Nikki deliver aching vulnerability and tightly coiled strength. Griffin Slivka and Payton Christopher McLeod avoid caricature in their portrayals of well-meaning but wounded men, and Mantra Rostami’s Mojdeh, anxious, yearning, and impossible not to root for, is a quiet storm.
Every character contributes a voice to the play’s uneasy chorus. Kara (Hanna Nur), who claims to feel “empowered” by violent sex, and Eggo (McLeod), whose wounded masculinity masks deeper fears, are not offered as answers but as provocations.
Its humor is sharp, its empathy genuine, and its refusal to package trauma into a neat moral lesson feels like a form of integrity.
This is a theater of resistance, but also of reckoning. Funny and frightening, tender and profane, HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF captures a generation caught mid-flinch, young people trying to figure out how to fight back without losing who they are. The humor makes you uneasy for laughing, then lingers long after, less like a sermon than a bruise you keep prodding to see if it still hurts.