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Manic

Manic

At ZOO Playground

By Luisa Hahn

Using puppets that she has made of her three sex partners, Raina Greifer explores themes of bad sex, contemporary girlhood, blurry lines of consent, and sexual violence in this emotional and at times funny performance. Having come to share her poetry, Greifer spots her former sex-partners (a balloon with red hair, a square head in a denim jacket, and a small dangly construct including a string cheese) in the audience and is prompted to instead talk about the (bad) sex she has had with these men. Quoting feminist law professional Catherine MacKinnon on the impossibility of equal sex within a deeply sexist society the show quickly becomes very earnest as Rainer talks about the contexts of her sexual relationships and explores the tension of wanting sex and male validation on the one hand and the feeling of being violated on the other hand.

Though interspersed by comic and heart-warming moments like childhood photos of Greifer shown on a slide projector and the audience chanting “I deserve so many good orgasms”, the tone of the performance is serious and characterised by the immense openness and skill with which she tells her story. Using the puppets Greifer negotiates and questions the sexual encounters she has had and why they felt as bad as they did. The line between “bad” and not consensual sex remains as complicated as it can be in real life, except for the hardest to watch sequence of this show when Grainer leaves the room and the story of her sexual assault by a nameless – and puppetless – perpetrator is told on the slide show, obviously distinct from those she considers sex partners.

The thoughts, fears, doubts, wishes, and experiences portrayed in this show will be familiar to many femme people of Greifer’s generation and beyond. It is this universality that lifts Manic as a show from an exceptionally written and acted personal story to a powerful feminist performance that addresses so much of the dynamics of sex and how they can harm young femme people, but not without being an extraordinary example of how they can cope with and reclaim them