Review: HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF at Stray Cat Theatre

Guest contributor David Appleford offers a penetrating review of Stray Cat Theatre’s production of   HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF.    

Liliana Padilla’s funny, jagged, and sometimes deliberately incoherent HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF, now playing at Tempe Center for the Arts until February 28, throws us into a world where young people, especially young women, are handed rape whistles and pepper spray instead of real answers. With urgency and compassion, the play asks a question it refuses to simplify: what does it actually mean to be safe?

The premise of this Stray Cat Theatre production is as stark as it is familiar. A student named Susannah has been sexually assaulted at a party. In the aftermath, her sorority sisters and a few well-meaning frat boys gather for an improvised self-defense class. They arrive seeking strength and clarity. What they encounter instead are tangled echoes of desire, trauma, insecurity, and the double-edged myths young adults still cling to when trying to understand sex and power in a post–Me Too world.

The show’s physicality is its own kind of poetry: combative, well-choreographed, and unrelenting. Director Elizabeth Broeder creates a space where every gesture counts, where each sparring session risks tipping into revelation. Maren Maclean Mascarelli’s fight and intimacy coordination bring startling immediacy even to the most comic moments, including the hip-thrust maneuver that transforms assault into escape in a single muscular beat. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also an act of survival.

For all its physical punch, the play’s deepest wounds are psychological. Locker-room banter, confessions and unsettling humor are as disarming in their honesty as they are frustrating in their confusion. Characters discuss masturbation habits with the same casual ease as missed classes. At times, it feels like overhearing an unfiltered group chat come to life. The dialogue overlaps, stumbles, and interrupts itself. This is how people in pain, or pretending not to be, actually talk.

The play also avoids the ‘perfect victim’ trope. Its characters are allowed to be unlikeable, angry, horny, contradictory, and messy in ways that feel recognizably human, and that refusal to sanitize experience is likely to register as bracingly authentic for a younger generation of theatergoers.

Padilla’s script leans wide rather than deep, introducing more ideas than a 90-minute play can fully contain. Still, it’s buoyed by a cast that pulses with commitment and complexity. Christine Ward as Brandi brings grounded empathy. “Repeat after me,” she orders the class. “I am a fighter!”  Meghan Ramos as Diana and Angelica Saario as Nikki deliver aching vulnerability and tightly coiled strength. Griffin Slivka and Payton Christopher McLeod avoid caricature in their portrayals of well-meaning but wounded men, and Mantra Rostami’s Mojdeh, anxious, yearning, and impossible not to root for, is a quiet storm.

Every character contributes a voice to the play’s uneasy chorus. Kara (Hanna Nur), who claims to feel “empowered” by violent sex, and Eggo (McLeod), whose wounded masculinity masks deeper fears, are not offered as answers but as provocations. Time and again, the play builds momentum toward revelation, then pulls back. Characters grow bolder, angrier, more reckless, yet are rarely allowed to fully tip into transformation or collapse. The punches land, but the follow-through remains hesitant. Even the play’s more provocative gestures of a sudden same-sex kiss, or a late eruption of theatrical spectacle feel less like ruptures than signals of paths not entirely taken.

The play swings violently between comedy and devastating trauma. While this tonal volatility is clearly a deliberate choice, some audience members may find the whiplash disorienting, with moments of humor occasionally undercutting the weight of the material.

And yet, HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF is not a play to dismiss. Its humor is sharp, its empathy genuine, and its refusal to package trauma into a neat moral lesson feels like a form of integrity. The play understands that rape culture doesn’t only brutalize, it teaches people how to hide and accommodate. What it sometimes lacks in daring conclusions it makes up for in the precision of its observations. There is no catharsis in the traditional sense. The play deliberately avoids a tidy ending in which the characters find peace or justice. For some, this will register as an honest reflection of life; for others, it may feel like a withholding of narrative payoff.

Visually, the production is lean and evocative. Eric Beeck’s gymnasium set is stark but expressive, with Stacey Walston’s lighting casting moody shadows across padded floors and gym walls. Jacob Nichols’ sound design riffs playfully on power anthems without losing the production’s deeper throb of unease.

This is a theater of resistance, but also of reckoning. Funny and frightening, tender and profane, HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF captures a generation caught mid-flinch, young people trying to figure out how to fight back without losing who they are. The humor makes you uneasy for laughing, then lingers long after, less like a sermon than a bruise you keep prodding to see if it still hurts.

As presented by Stray Cat Theatre, Padilla’s writing understands momentum better than certainty. It throws a punch, steps back, and leaves the audience to decide what landed and what still aches. The play refuses tidy resolution, not out of coyness but honesty. And perhaps that’s the point. When it comes to surviving trauma, what does resolution even look like? Clarity is rarely the reward. Sometimes all you get is the knowledge that the fight isn’t finished. And neither are you. 

HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF runs through February 28th at:

The Tempe Center for the Arts -- https://www.tempecenterforthearts.com/ -- 833-ATC-SEAT -- 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ

Stray Cat Theatre -- https://straycattheatre.org/

Artwork by Erick Turner