In a sparsely packed Harlan Chapel on Friday, four female students — Sarah Duffet ’17, LaQuasia Cherry ’17, Sarah Waldron ’16 and Yaznil Baez ’16 — walk onto the stage. They are wearing all black, and their mouths are covered with strips of duct tape. Then, the audience hears the voice of a woman coming from a recording in the chapel, and the room goes silent.

“Survival: a performance” was performed in the Harlan Chapel on Friday through Sunday. The piece focused on women and their experiences with sexual violence. It was made up of four vignettes, each written by one of the four performers.

The first vignette, starting with the recording, was written by Baez, and it focused on catcalling. In the recording, a woman talked about her experience with catcalling, with men on the street constantly calling her names such as “baby.” Many other women in the recording chimed in and all started talking at once about similar experiences, yelling out other names men had called them. While the recording played, the four actors simply sat on the stage with the tape over their mouths, staring into the audience while everyone in the chapel listened to the recording. When the recording finished, the actors pulled the tape off and angrily started talking about catcalling. They then walked through the audience, each holding a card on which they had written about a personal experience in which they had been catcalled. They passed the cards around to members of the audience for them to read aloud. Interestingly, all of the members who they passed the card to were males — they admitted after the show that they had done that purposely because they wanted to hear male voices retelling the stories.

Duffet’s vignette was memorable. It is about a relationship between a mother (Duffet) and daughter (Waldron), both of whom are sexual assault survivors. The daughter has just come out as homosexual, a fact that the mother is not happy about. What made this scene extremely impressive was the use of props. At the beginning of the scene, Duffet walks in, dumps out a bag of laundry and begins folding laundry on a table in the chapel. The mother and daughter then proceed to have a fight.

However, for the whole duration of the scene, the daughter is fighting not with her mother but directly with an anxious version of herself. Duffet simply stands in the background folding laundry, which represented the mentality of a mother figure, serving as a simple backdrop to the scene.

The most powerful vignette by far was Waldron’s. Waldron sat in a tub filled with shallow water while Cherry, Baez and Duffet, representing voices in her head, recounted to her stories about her experiences with men. As they were telling these stories, they dipped their hands in paint and rubbed it on Waldron’s body. Waldron repeatedly attempted to wash this paint of with the water in the tub, but whenever she did, the other actresses continued to rub paint on her while telling her the stories. It was unclear exactly what the paint was supposed to represent, which made the scene extremely captivating, since it kept me guessing throughout the entire scene as to what message it was trying to convey. In a talkback after the show, the cast said that the paint represented the memories of past experiences — the voices kept painting the memories of these unpleasant experiences into Waldron’s mind, and no matter how hard she tried to “wash them off,” the voices kept bringing them back.

“Survival” was a unique, powerful and captivating play. The chapel setting lent to the originality of the show, providing a very different backdrop from many other theater shows. The voices, from the actresses and the recordings, echoed against the walls of the chapel, making each message even more impactful. The use of props as metaphors was a creative way of telling the individual stories. The play, although short in length and composed of a small cast, did a good job engaging the Brandeis community in such an important topic.