The one-woman theater performance Beastly: An Autobiographical Feminist Folk Tale at the Boston Center for the Arts opens in a not-too-distant dystopian future where oil tycoons rule while the world burns. Melissa Hale Woodman, who created and starred in Beastly, delves into female sexuality, identity, and aging, while connecting these autobiographical experiences with critiques of patriarchy, corporate greed, and climate crisis.
The show is told through interwoven short personal monologues with Woodman dressing up as animals to tell fables in delightful rhyming verse. Her character travels back in time, drawing on her personal experiences – from her teenage years to motherhood to perimenopause.
Woodman’s wacky, funny performance captivated the audience during its run in late February to early March. Her autobiographical “takes” on growing older, women’s sexuality, and fighting patriarchy were successfully brought alive on the stage with humor. But Beastly largely drew on a worldview grounded in White feminism and White liberalism. (Hint: Taylor Swift is a heralded feminist icon in the play.) Beastly thus presents a limited examination of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. While the fun fable-like short-stories and intimate revelations of aging as a woman were interesting, as a woman of color I found that Beastly could benefit from reflection on the need for intersectional feminism in challenging power structures. Although Woodman is writing what she knows, Beastly’s minimal consideration of non-White, non-U.S., and non-wealthy experiences of the pains of patriarchy, capitalism, climate crisis — as well as the collective struggles to dismantle these —- was unsettling.
Woodman’s storytelling about her life is vulnerable and raw. Woodman starts an intimate short story from her youth with “I haven’t told anyone this before…” Beastly’s most successful moments were those in which Woodman’s expressive voice brought to life a world largely hostile to women. Alternating between her personal voice – unabashedly sensual, humorous, and at times serious – and those of the dramatic animal characters she inhabited, Woodman kept the audience members on their toes. The play culminated in a call to action for those in the audience to close their eyes and leave with a personal commitment to fighting for social change.
Beastly’s narration, however, of the threats of corporate greed and what is needed to address them largely reflects a White feminist perspective. White or liberal feminism prioritizes the perspectives of white middle class women and the issues that primarily affect them. White feminism also universalizes these agendas as being those of all feminists. For many women of color and other marginalized people in both the Global North and Global South, climate change and capitalism are real, imminent threats rather than future-bound, theoretical, looming dystopias. These present realities look like displacement from homes; threats to lives for speaking out against corporate power; and forced migration. At the end of Beastly, Woodman asks audience members to close their eyes, imagine a better future, and leave the play remembering that this performance inspired them to take change for social justice. What change does she mean, and social justice for whom? The lack of specificity of the kind of actions needed to fight capitalism, patriarchy, and the climate crisis is in itself a privilege; the message that one can summon the courage of Taylor Swift reproducing her album on her own terms “Taylor’s Version” and individually fight these systems is unrealistic for many communities under threat.
Beastly’s frequent, flippant mentions of “colonialism” were jarring. Colonialism was featured as a rhetorical stand-in for a big bad system to take down (listed alongside capitalism, CEOs, etc.) rather than a real ongoing system that deserves treatment with historical specificity. The repeated call-outs of colonialism were strange, given the play created an island of White middle class experience seemingly detached from any colonized person’s experiences, or any internal examination of potential complicity in perpetuating ongoing colonization. Woodman mentioned off-hand that she normally gets lots of Amazon packages, but was boycotting Amazon for a day during the Feb. 28 consumer boycott. How should someone working at an Amazon packaging facility respond to corporate greed and capitalism — while also surviving within capitalism — without the privilege of a middle or upper-middle class consumer? How would a working-class Boston Chinatown resident being pushed out of their neighborhood by capitalist land grabs, while also facing intensified climatic issues (e.g. worse air quality, extreme heat and minimal shade, etc.) feel connected to Beastly’s message?
Woodman daylights as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Corporate Accountability, a progressive advocacy organization that seeks to hold corporations accountable. The benefit performance raised money for Woodman’s organization as well as Brew & Forge and Neighborhood Birth Center.
