Writer and Director: Scott Weinstein
The moment when you leave a female friend to find her way home on her own after a night out can be an intensely nerve-wracking, dread-filled time. As you wait for her text message reassuring you of her safe arrival home, the mind can spin out an infinity of terrible possibilities. The one-man monodrama My Silence Gives Consent, written, performed and directed by 17-year-old Scott Weinstein, spins out the torment of that limbo into a one-hour stream-of-consciousness exploration of feminism. Though the focus on coming to a higher understanding of the role a man plays in the fight to make sure women are protected is undoubtedly well-intentioned, the piece itself shows a lack of nuance, insight or narrative interest.
As males (and it feels important to point out that this review is also from a male point of view) we are, as Weinstein puts it, “on the other side”, and as such there’s an element of stepping outside our lived experience to empathise and protect women against the violence of the patriarchy. This is the angle from which Weinstein’s character is struggling to comprehend feminism. He berates himself for his innate complicity, embodying male guilt in a rather self-important mess of laboured metaphors and sketched-out scenarios, all delivered in the same untransposed declamatory tone.
The problem is that the personal perspective you would expect to blossom from the dramatic big bang of the piece barely materialises. The issues of feminism are described from a displaced, universal point of view. There are dramatically-lit descriptions of scenes on trains or in the street, but there is no real personal bite to them. We are not given a sense of a character who has had any experience of male guilt beyond an imagined potential to do something bad.
Similarly – and this is most egregious, given the focus of the piece – the female character, whose text message we are waiting for, is not given any personhood apart from her gender. The character on stage apparently cares for this friend deeply enough to agonise at length in wide-eyed terror for her safety, but he does not offer any details about her that would really bring the audience into their world. She is certainly not given a voice in any way, making the play an exercise in a kind of onanistic self-flagellating male impotence. Which simply doesn’t have to be the case in real life, because women are here to help us be better feminists.
Weinstein articulates the inchoate feminism of a young man as if it is a profound, conclusive thesis. What he projects as poetic musings are reworded platitudes. There is very little development of the ideas as the play progresses, and zero self-awareness of how basic his understanding might be. This is all the more grating when the finger of blame is briefly pointed back at the audience. The fact that Weinstein has stepped out onto the stage to fight for the cause of feminism is hugely admirable, but in terms of creating well-rounded, original and entertaining content, Scott Weinstein Productions still have a lot to learn.
Runs until 15 April 2023
