5 Questions with ‘What Every Girl Should Know’

Between The Buildings proudly presents the Australian Premiere of 'What Every Girl Should Know' by Monica Byrne, directed by Cathy Hunt. Produced by Vivian Nguyen and Sophie Muckart.

A play for the next decade set in New York at the start of the last century. Thrust together in St Mary’s House, a Catholic reformatory—teenagers Anne, Theresa, Lucy & Joan are struggling to fit what they are taught by the Church with their own experiences. When they hear about Margaret Sanger—a radical birth control advocate, the girls eagerly set up an alternate system of worship in which they start to confide their secrets and desires to her instead. The miracles and raptures that follow risk making them dangerously free from the system that seemingly protects them. Yet when their fertile secrets are revealed, each girl has to decide for herself who to trust and what exactly she should know.

Book tickets to What Every Girl Should Know, playing at Brunswick Mechanics Institute between 10–16 February.

No.1

How did this version of What Every Girl Should Know come about?

I came across the script with a friend and was stunned to read a contemporary play about young women in the 20th century grappling with some of the same things that women struggle with now—the right to control our own bodies, the right to determine our own experiences, and the right to truly understand ourselves without self-judgment or shame.

As a result, I was compelled to put on the play with my new independent theatre company Between the Buildings. I assembled an amazing team of women to play the four girls and brought the script to [director] Cathy Hunt—we met last year working on La Mama’s Explorations season, where I was part of a production called Under the Skin, a monologue I wrote and performed as my own mother telling the story of her experience migrating to Australia. Cathy and I worked together on developing that text and I was intrigued by the way she spoke about the story, which formed the beginnings of a collaboration between us as director and actor/producer.

I also studied acting at the 16th St Actors Studio with cast member Shirong Wu and was in another historical play about women’s experiences last year (The Other Place) with Ravenna Bouckaert, who plays Joan. It’s a fantastic feminist script and I could not resist bringing it to life with a passionate female-led creative team and all-female cast.

No.2

Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate whose figure you revolve around in the play, wrote the titular newspaper column in New York City in 1916. How do you think her ideas are still relevant in 2020, especially in a society where feminism is both a buzzword but where women’s rights are still curtailed in some ways?
Margaret Sanger’s contribution to the history of women’s rights has forged a crucial privilege which is often overlooked in the 21st century. The ability as a woman to make choices regarding our own bodies was more of a radical idea during Sanger’s time than it is now. Still, the relevant ideas from Sanger’s legacy have not been fully accepted into a system that continues to limit women’s freedoms. For example, abortion in NSW was only decriminalised late last year. Possibly our systems are still not ready to be held accountable for this ongoing injustice enacted against women? Perhaps it is also that we are so frequently refused the opportunity to hold positions of power to make collective decisions for ourselves?

So as movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp (definitely buzzwords even if feminism itself is enduring) bring about new waves of feminism which encourage women to use their voices and hold patriarchal systems and individuals accountable, we want to continue to align ourselves to Sanger’s belief of fully understanding our own capabilities and power.

No.3

What has been the most enjoyable parts of creating What Every Girl Should Know? Have there been any surprises or revelations that deviated from your expectations?

It’s an exciting risk to take on an opportunity to present work that is new within our community, especially in Australia. One of the most enjoyable parts of the process was being able to work on such a textured story. The cast and I come from relatively different backgrounds, but we keep finding common threads that illuminate the universal ideas that Monica Byrne’s play encompasses. It is a feat to speak against an institution like the Catholic Church that has gone through many successive scandals, and as storytellers we want to respect that this institution is important to many. At the same time, we also want to look at how this institution and similar arenas of power have impacted upon our lives as young women so far.

In creating the work we’ve had some wonderful rehearsals that got us exploring the terrain of the text in a playful way. It’s been satisfying, surprising and a lot of fun creating the dances for the play with our choreographer Danni Ray—we’ve been working with her to discover how the pent-up feelings brimming underneath what the girls say overflow into movement. Having both the text and the physicality has really helped us create our characters and the play.

No.4

Where do you see the Australian premiere differing from previous stagings of the same play in the United States?

For one thing, we are leaping further to imagine being young women in New York City in 1914. We take less for granted. This is not our history; we have had to research it intensively. The choice to cast actors from a range of backgrounds is intended to break down barriers for our audiences, and illuminate the wider intersectional feminist themes of the play. This is not just a white story.

As an independent theatre company, we want to continue to push boundaries as well as respecting what the playwright has offered. Despite this piece being American, our audiences can value the story and its underlying challenge to our complicity in accepting who we choose to trust and what we choose to know. Instead of the saints, Margaret Sanger. Instead of the established patriarchal church, trusting in our own instincts and friendships and power.

No.5

What kinds of conversations are you hoping to open up with this production?

We hope to get our audiences really thinking about their own beliefs and experiences around sexuality and power. What young women do and don’t say, how much we keep hidden from each other while seeming to share and be open, and the reasons we might collude in that secrecy. The title of the play invites people to consider what they truly believe “every girl should know”. There are key moments in the script where the writer has the girls talk about women of the future and invites us to contemplate how far we have actually come.

There’s a challenge in there for anyone who comes to see the play to take a moment to recollect their own experience, to think about what they used to believe and how they used to see the world when they were younger. The idea is that despite the 100 or so intervening years we are more deceived by accepting the circumstances of the limited world that we are in, believing ourselves more modern and advanced than the past. What does it cost to truly go outside and leave those structures (that support and protect us even as they oppress and patronise us) behind? That’s what the characters are grappling with and hopefully our audiences will find it fun to see those difficulties unfold for the characters as they go along for the ride. How we can be free is one of the bigger conversations to be had. How we can stop being complicit is another. And how the power of young women’s friendship and fantasy can be harnessed to help them escape oppression is something the play makes happen on stage, to kick start us into imagining.