While the American Association of Port Authorities ranks Seattle only 36th in trade among all U.S. ports, we are the third largest American port of entry for trade in humans. A new Seattle theatre company is taking on the human concerns relating to this problem in a pair of benefit performances this weekend.
Back in 2010 Seattle actor, dancer, choreographer and director Megan Becker attended an Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Ruined. This play by Lynn Nottage, which won everything but the Tony in 2009, concerns women in a Democratic Republic of Congo brothel during that country’s ongoing instability and civil wars.
Following the performance the audience was invited to write letters to women in a similar situation to that of those depicted in the play. Becker wrote a letter but she wanted to do more; she wanted to go and get these women out of their situation.
Rather than book a flight for D.R. Congo, Becker started asking questions, doing research, and learning about human trafficking and the sex trade. The result is Costly Desires, a multimedia text-based performance that follows the lives of two women and the man who buys them (November 9th and 10th at Greenwood Square; all tickets $15).
In a recent interview with The SunBreak Becker noted that the show is not about demonizing either prostitutes or johns. “What the play does is it humanizes everybody,” she said.
In depicting lives marked by physical and emotional abuse, Becker and her team at the nascent Drybones Theater Company rely on dance to provide some protective distance for the audience. These abstracted portrayals also heighten the characters’ internal experiences and work against the objectification inherent in theatre, a key concern for Becker.
“I’m really trying to avoid being voyeuristic because that would be playing into the problem,” said Becker. “Even with things like the fake sex website that we had to put up, the girls and I talked for a long time: What would those poses look like, what are they comfortable with, and I’m heavily controlling that media.”
The fake website (actually a PowerPoint that audiences will see projected as John surfs the web) isn’t the only multimedia aspect of this production. Drybones Theater Company also created a news broadcast and much of the show includes original compositions by Chris Ingrao.
Becker is funding Costly Desires through an Indiegogo campaign. All ticket sales from the production will be donated to two organizations fighting sex trafficking. REST takes a soft approach to sex trafficking reaching out to prostitutes and offering them resources. The other program Costly Desires will support is The Genesis Project, which was started by police as a response to the sex trafficking they encountered in their work. It offers prostitutes support services as an alternative to incarceration and aggressively targets pimps.
Becker sees those pimps as the most culpable players in the sex trafficking problem. In her quest to humanize those involved in the trade she has become interested in the social and economic forces that create pimps. However Costly Desires doesn’t address this interest directly. “The only ones I didn’t have time to write about were the pimps,” she admitted. “If I were going to write about pimps I’d have to write a whole other play.”
