The hauntingly girlish voice of Melanie Martinez’ marks our descent into childhood horror in Laboratory Theater’s Body & Sold. The theme of lost innocence that runs through Martinez’ album is paralleled in this play by Deborah Lake Fortson which chronicles the experiences of human trafficking survivors. Based on interviews with survivors, the piece is grounded in reality while simultaneously achieving a level of surrealism.
The surrealism stems from the topic itself in many ways. Most of us, hopefully, have not been victims of human trafficking and that creates a certain natural distance between the art and its audience. The beauty of the work is that it's entirely conscious of that distance and utilizes it to its advantage. First by establishing that it exists physically in a place that is our reality and yet not. The stage is remarkably bare with minimal dressing just chairs and a staircase. They reference places that we never travel to but inhabit all the same. A delicate ecosystem of physical abstraction and emotional realism that is sometime successful, sometimes less so.
Directed by Kathleen Moye who is pursuing her master’s degree in drama therapy, you can see that influence in the staging. The chairs often set up to form a semicircle as the characters’ discuss their lives, the entire play feels like a group therapy session. The more obvious sign of her background however is the compassion and clarity with which the material is handled.
The characters are aware of themselves within the framework of the script and make joking asides wondering who will be cast to play them in the show. They directly address the audience, confronting us with the tragedy of their circumstances and inviting us to walk around in it. They never provoke pity nor do they seek it. Instead they achieve something that is all too rare in sexual assault narratives: understanding.
Very often people address the issue with all the finesse of an afterschool special. Although well intentioned, these efforts may do more harm than good and rape culture still runs rampant. It’s insidious and permeates nearly all aspects of social life. It’s in our streets, our schools, ourselves. Combatting sexual assault begins with unlearning these biases as a community and standing in solidarity with one another.
Body & Sold is all about solidarity. The characters are vastly different people but as the show progresses you see the cruelty that intertwines them. Their voices are interwoven thematically and literally as they rage against the system that abandoned them. They mourn for the loss of lives that never were and lovers who never truly loved them. Most of all, they are searching. Searching endlessly for someone who will treat them with tenderness and warmth.
The best they can manage is temporary sanctuary. They meet a man with kind eyes who offers them hot chocolate and a place to stay the night. They meet a man who's really a very good man. He almost never hits them. An older man shows them love and they feel it all over. They feel safe and they are. For a time.
Perhaps one of the strangest misconceptions about domestic violence is the idea that it begins in violence and they should have known better. You can’t know better, you really can’t. Rarely does it ever begin in blood and screaming. It’s more akin to stepping into a warm bath and over time the temperature gets turned up until your skin starts to peel off. You don’t leave the water because you’re accustomed to it by now. There is comfort in the familiar no matter how deadly. Trying to leave will get you killed. Better to stay.
In one of the most chilling moments of the show, we hear from someone on the other side of this script. A man who picked up a young girl he found at the bus stop. He takes her out everywhere. Clubs, parties, fancy restaurants. He showers her in affection and buys her diamond earrings from Tiffany’s. As he sits on the edge of the stage, he confides in the audience. A Machiavellian move straight out of Shakespeare and House of Cards. He tells us that we gotta be cool. Treat them special. Find out what they like and get it for them. Make them feel like you love them. By sharing this with us we become complicit in his abuse.
We also see the various tactics used by abusers both familial and otherwise to lure young women into these situations. One girl suffers at the hands of a family member who tells her its ‘our little secret’ while another person abandons two girls in a strip club knowing full well what’s going to happen to them.
Returning to the archetype of the abuser, we see a more nuanced approach to the trope. Something they coined “the sophisticated pimp”. A young gay boy fresh out of the midwest moves to New York to escape a heavily religious background and falls in with an older man. He is nothing like the monsters you envision. At first he is closer to a kindly Daddy Warbucks adopting Annie out of the orphanage and bringing her into a new life of glamour and luxury. He treats the young boy gently but the child has no delusions about this arrangement. He knows that this will eventually involve sex and has accepted that. He grows to love this man and in turn feels loved.
The realization years later that the man he loved was using him is nothing short of devastating. When the character tells us that he “still can’t work out what he felt for me” it reminds us that the aftermath of trauma lasts a lifetime. The post traumatic stress shared by all the survivors is never fully overcome. Coping not conquering. The survivors describe themselves as living in a war zone that America doesn’t want to see. A war that they are then blamed for.
This show has absolutely no tolerance for victim blaming or the so called lolita complex. The axis of responsibility is never placed on their shoulders. Indeed it would be impossible to do so considering these people entered into this as children and teenagers. One of the key elements of the play is a young girl sitting on the staircase. Dressed up like a porcelain doll, she remains silent for most of the show. A living reminder of the childhood that was stolen from them. She has one great scene where she tapes up her teddy bear’s mouth, telling the bear it has a big mouth and there are things we can’t talk about. It serves as a strong condemnation of the culture of shame that surrounds sexual assault victims and the erasure of their traumas.
That being said while the characters are never held responsible for the horror that was inflicted on them they are also never reduced to just their pain. They retain their agency and are active agents in their own lives. Free to make both good and bad choices, all of their decisions are born from a very human place of desperation and wild hope. We see them struggle with these decisions and their consequences but we can never judge them for it.
They don’t always fall nicely into their assigned roles either. An aspect of sexual trafficking that is well addressed in this show is women’s role in abuse. There’s what you might consider positive sexism in portrayals of sexual traffickers on television. This idea that a woman can only be a victim or a hero. That our innate womanly goodness prevents us from being anything else. While it's certainly true that this play is full of female heroes (the social workers come to mind) it is not interested in black and white morality. One of the survivors describes with great shame how they indoctrinated her to recruit young girls. Trained her. They plant seeds in your self conscious telling you that you are worthless. They break you and rebuild you in their image.
Amidst all this darkness, there remains light. Levity and joy. The friendship between two girls that outlasts their shared trauma and centers them. The former pornographer thinking about sending his dad a copy of his films. The young man in leather who
Mothers being reunited with their children. Girls going back to school to get their degrees. Becoming social workers, opening shelters and volunteering in LGBT youth centers.
Together they learn to breathe. Together they build a family.
Ultimately the purpose the show isn’t to provide catharsis or to wrap a shiny red ribbon around it and tell us everything’s going to be ok. It’s not ok. The survivors in this play learn to breathe around the pain in their chests but that pain should have never existed in the first place. At the show they handed out pamphlets for abuse counseling centers and the q & a portion revolved around informing the community of local efforts to combat human trafficking.
The Laboratory Theater of Florida is known for its youth outreach programs and its commitment to social activism theater. French painter Georges Braque once said that art is a wound turned into light. The Lab exemplifies this light.
Contact List -
The Laboratory Theater: (239) 218-0481, www.laboratorytheaterflorida.com
SWFL Regional Human Trafficking Coalition:(239) 410- 050, SWFL-HumanTrafficking.org
Artreach Human Trafficking Awareness Partnerships: (239) 415 - 2635
Abuse Counseling Treatment, Inc. (ACT) 24 Hour Hotline: (239) 939 -3112
Florida Hotlines: (800) 500-1119 or (888) 956 - 7273
National Hotline: (800) 799 - SAFE
