‘And in longing, she bites’
And in longing she bites opened with the full cast onstage. The all-female cast was comprised of an overly enthusastic sex education teacher (Ayelet Schrek ’17), the poet Sappho (Caley Chase ’16), a girl sent to a weight loss camp (Emma Hanselman ’18) and two friends exploring their feelings for each other (Julie Joseph ’18 and Rachel Zhu ’18).
The play, written and directed by Sophie Greenspan ’15, followed the characters as they grew up and discovered their identities, sexualities and relationships as women to the rest of society.
The show used a series of vignettes to express these experiences.
The play broke down the barrier between the audience and the stage in novel ways.
The characters frequently ventured beyond the stage’s boundaries, expanding the stage to include the chairs, the aisles and the space right in front of the seated first row.
One scene had the full cast run through the aisles, each delivering a different monologue about her first experiences of womanhood.
Another scene had members of the cast seated in the audience, talking back to other cast members on stage and interrupting their monologues.
One such scene—arguably the play’s funniest—was where the sex education teacher tried to simulate and explain lesbian sex to the audience by using two cast members as demonstrators.
The scene’s comedy was inhanced by cast members heckling the teacher from the audience and by the demonstrators periodically leaving the stage to begin “demonstrating” what they had learned.
Despite the scene’s comedy, the sex education teacher made poignant points about the ambiguous definition of lesbian sex and about how sex education in schools is typically very heteronormative.
From the short scenes and monologues where the characters expressed their feelings about various aspects of conventional femininity, to the brief dance sections and the longer, more plot-driven scenes, the play moved quickly and the hour flew by.
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