Review – Oh Yes Oh No – Louise Orwin at Camden People’s Theater

You know that thing where there’s a really great show you only barely heard about before it completely sold out? Yeah. This is one of them. As of the time I am writing this review, Oh Yes Oh No only had four tickets left for tonight. Yes, tonight. It’s sold out tomorrow. So this, loyal readers, is your heads up. Dash away online before you finish reading this and get your ticket purchased, or make the attempt to do waitlisting for the final performances of Oh Yes Oh No. If you want a night of theater that made you feel like you just got a blackjack to the back of the head, Louise Orwin’s one person show is it.

I did not know what to expect from this show. I thought I was going to get to hear someone talk about how wanting to be female and sexual, or sexually submissive, isn’t really approved in our society. These things are (mostly) true. But I thought it was going to be funny, an idea I stuck to even more strongly when I saw there were Barbie dolls on stage. What I didn’t expect was to be pulled into someone else’s dark nightmare populated by horrors inflicted internally and externally, by society, men and her/your/the self. You are told you can run away, but you will not. You will want to sit there until the end. You will want to see that there will be an end.

In the world of SM, sex is play and people engage in fantasies that are discussed and consented to beforehand. But the character of this play has a problem. What she likes – being hit, being choked, being hurt so much it’s nearly dangerous – seems wrong. And for her, there’s a double bind, because these things have been done to her in a situation where she did not consent. She was attacked She was raped. And now, she has to deal with the fact that she can both be seen as asking for it because she fantasized about violence and objectification, and of being in the horrible situation of not being able to ask for it any more … that is, to not be able to ask for what she finds hot. Being raped takes away way more choices than I might ever have thought.

Orwin makes many of these elements come to life in her show in the oddest ways. She pulls a member of the audience in to participate (we had a lovely leather jacketed short haired woman radiating all sorts of androgyny), and while they are asked if they consented, their answers are read off of cards. It plays with consent and in some ways highlights the fact that in a sexual situation, you might give your consent, but you may actually do so unwillingly … because you’re saying what you have to say to keep yourself safe. Because, actually, saying no and being hurt less may be a better option. I’m sorry, this is true. I’m sorry this is true. It is true. It just simply is.

Overhead, at times, we get to hear the voices of women talking about rape, about their rapes, about how it affected them, about how they remember it, about how it has changed their fantasy life, about how people think it should change them. But these aren’t all there is to this show. We have Barbie and Ken re-enacting sexual desire in a “safe” space, a “play” space, a space where dolls can spread their legs and bounce against each other and it’s all laughs. It’s a space that doesn’t reflect real life, where the people who prey on women are all so often their friends and acquaintances. We can walk away from the dolls. Barbie doesn’t cry and she isn’t hurt. It’s all fun.

As the show evolves, we are forced to accept Orwin’s statements, that she can want to be horribly treated and love it, with the fact that victim treatment struggles with shaming and the implicit belief that if you like a good smack in the face, you’re damaged, somehow. It’s a complex piece to navigate from the inside, but everything, honestly, all fell together so well from the outside. The struggle she faced was so real. I’ve never seen this subject handled on stage before and it was both moving and poignant, and clever and insightful as a staged work, hitting on so many levels.

I could go on at length. I could write a thesis on this show. But I’m just going to stop now, while there are still four tickets left, and tell you: go.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Tuesday, May 9th, 2017. It closes May 11th.)

Tags: Camden People's Theater, camden People's Theatre, Hotbed Festival of Sex, Louise Orwin, Oh Yes Oh No