BRUTE-ISH takes place in an upside-down world where gender roles are bluntly switched to resemble our American patriarchy helmed by women. The linear narrative illustrates the unraveling of a marriage, from its happy years to the inception of an affair to years after the divorce. But vaudevillian-like interludes fracture the central storyline, illuminating the female-patriarchy in which this particular household lives, and in turn, forces a new perspective on our collective understanding of the classic family drama.

FULL SYNOPSIS BELOW:

A brief prologue depicts a day in the life of Charlotte’s pregnancy. She, an up and coming family and sex therapist, and Anthony, her husband, and stay-at-home dad to be, have recently moved into his dream house. Charlotte plans to begin seeing patients in her new at-home office in order to maximize her productivity during her maternity leave.
The play then picks up almost two decades later. America has just nominated its first man for the presidency of the United States which means more to Anthony than Charlotte realizes. Their son, Charlie, now in high school, is the only boy on the all-girls football team; for this and other reasons, both Charlotte and Anthony begin to wonder if he might be gay. Charlotte is now a renowned sex therapist with a cutting-edge study utilizing life-size sex dolls to help heal sexual disorders. Ironically, Anthony has lost his sex drive and despite both their best efforts, their marriage is beginning to fall apart.  Charlotte’s new client, Steele, a history teacher at Charlie’s school, comes to her desperate to fix a long-time problem; he has never had an orgasm. Reluctantly, Steele employs Charlotte’s sex doll therapy. After only a few meaningful sessions fighting off mutual romantic feelings, both Steele and Charlotte’s relationship becomes much more than professional. They sleep together for the first time on election day when the first male candidate for president loses the race; Anthony is devastated by the results.
The epilogue picks up again after another two decades have passed. Charlie, now openly gay and an accomplished political scientist, is being honored with an esteemed award in civic engagement. And the former first-male candidate for president will be the one presenting him with the honor. When Charlie tells his father of the accomplishment, Anthony, now divorced, is overcome by the news and the prospect of meeting one of his heroes. Charlotte and Steele, now happily married, look back on the beginning of their relationship with some regret, but ultimately, in a world where men are constantly deferring to women, Charlotte finds solace in the message her affair sent to her son: value your own happiness and fulfilment, without sacrifice.
Interwoven throughout the narrative sections, short interludes build a hodgepodge picture of what this female-patriarchy looks like outside of this specific family. These interludes are played by a two-actor chorus that are made up to look like life-size sex dolls, similar to those in Charlotte’s study. In the narrative sections, the chorus play alternate characters— friends of the family, classmates, colleagues— still resembling life-size sex dolls. These actors are barely clothed, painted to heteronormative perfection so that an audience is consistently confronted by society’s ideal standard of the human form to further comment on how we consider sex and the expectations of gender. Each interlude places a spotlight on both the history and the present of this female-patriarchy. What does Wall Street frat-culture look like perpetuated by women? What did the suffrage movement look like helmed by men? How would we listen to Hip Hop objectifying male bodies instead of female? These moments open up the play’s imagined world in order to further push the thought-exercise at hand: what does it look like to put men in a woman’s role (and vice versa), and can this illuminate gendered micro-aggressions that modern gender politics have become numb to?

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