Theater project lets women who accused Trump tell their stories The Pussy Grabber Plays - eight sh

Theater project lets women who accused Trump tell their stories

The Pussy Grabber Plays – eight short pieces premiering in New York on Monday – humanize the people behind sexual misconduct allegations against the president


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Journalist and writer Natasha Stoynoff has co-written a play about Donald Trump ‘forcing his tongue down my throat’. Photograph: Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Natasha Stoynoff never thought her life would be turned into a musical – and certainly not for this reason. Once as a crime reporter, Stoynoff covered a serial killer, recalling how the mugshot-like photos of his many female victims gave her shivers. But during the 2016 US presidential election, when she became one of more than a dozen women to publicly accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, she came to identify with them: their lives had been flattened into a square-inch rendering of yet another female victim. Now Stoynoff says she is reclaiming her humanity by co-writing a play about Trump “forcing his tongue down my throat” and setting her experience to music and song. It comes as part of The Pussy Grabber Plays, a series of eight short plays that will have their premiere in New York City on Monday, each inspired by a different woman who came forward with allegations against Trump.
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In the past two years Stoynoff has shied away from press. But speaking to the Guardian from a remote cabin in northern Quebec where she’s been holed up recently finishing her latest books, including one about a cult published in August, Stoynoff was all enthusiasm. “I liked the fact that it was something I could be part of creating,” she said in her first phone interview since 2016. “I also thought it was a good way in the theater to humanize the women,” she said, “to tell a bit about the background of each woman, or something about them that would really bring them to life.”


That’s precisely what playwright Sharyn Rothstein and theater agent Kate Pines hoped to do when they first dreamed up the project. The two best friends and artistic collaborators had spent countless hours discussing how they could channel everything they felt after the election – the shock, anger, grief – into real social change. “Almost a year to the day after the election, it hit me,” Rothstein said. “I called Kate and told her, ‘What if we can reach out to the women who came forward before the election and share their stories?” They had observed what Stoynoff described feeling: even in the wake of #MeToo, when sexual misconduct allegations against powerful men were finally being taken seriously, Trump’s accusers were still being, as Pines put it, “reduced to photos on a screen or a soundbite or a name”.

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But Trump’s accusers aren’t the only women turning their experiences into art. James Franco accuser Sarah Tither-Kaplan has raised tens of thousands of dollars for a collaboration with female film-makers spotlighting sexual assault within the entertainment industry. Harvey Weinstein accuser Sarah Ann Masse has redoubled her focus on films aimed at sexual violence education, throwing herself into comedy exploring feminism, misogyny and victim blaming, as part of a duo with her husband. Pines meanwhile has her own connection to Trump. She is the daughter of Tony Schwartz, whom Trump threatened with legal action in 2016 after he spoke candidly with the New Yorker about his role in and remorse over ghostwriting Trump’s myth-making book The Art of the Deal.
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All proceeds of the run go to the New York Women’s Foundation.


https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jan/13/pussy-grabber-plays-donald-trump-natasha-stoynoff