INTERVIEW: ‘Wholehearted’ examines violence inside, outside the boxing ring
Photo: Suli Holum co-directed and stars in The Wholehearted. Photo courtesy of Kate Freer / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
The Wholehearted, the play from Deborah Stein and Suli Holum, looks at violence against women and ultimate redemption, all set in the world of female boxing. Stein wrote and co-directed the production, while Holum co-directed and performs. The play, in its local premiere, is currently running through April 1 at Abrons Arts Center in New York City.
Holum plays Dee Crosby, a boxer who was almost murdered by her own husband. Now that her ex is out of prison, she’s hellbent on revenge, no matter the cost. The question becomes whether Dee is able to find a sense of redemption as she charts her journey forward.
“Our goal was to create something a little bit different,” Holum said about the Stein | Holum Projects production. “First of all, we were very interested in creating a strong female lead, nice and complicated, who is sitting at the center of what we’ve come to think of as a revenge tragedy. The audience sits on four sides like crowds at a boxing match, and the event unfolds as both a very, very intimate portrayal of a woman trying to reconnect with a lost love and also a really large-scale heart-thumping recreation of a boxing match. There’s a live cameraman and then also a handheld camera, so there’s a lot of video in the show. … A lot of it is live feed, and then there’s also footage that we’ve created from this woman’s past life. And that gets projected on big jumbotrons above the stage, so as you can tell, we really made an effort to bring the world of boxing into the theater.”
Stein and Holum have been working on the piece for approximately five years, and it has toured Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Diego. Holum’s own interest in boxing goes back even further, so the subject matter of The Wholehearted has been on her mind for quite some time.
“I was following different stories of boxers, women boxers, and also interested in making a piece that addressed issues of interpersonal violence and violence against women as entertainment, which I really wanted to wrestle with that,” she said. “I think there are a lot of portrayals of violence against women that are so, so commonplace that it starts to lose its edge a bit. Every cop show, every procedural drama night after night, you just see images of women who have been battered and women being pulled out of drawers and morgues. I wanted to push back against that, create space for pushing back against that.”
Holum said she became fascinated by female boxers and the sports’ evolution into mixed martial arts (MMA). Theatrically she wanted to explore the tension between two types of violence: “violence, which is really upsetting, which is violence that exists in the interpersonal and domestic sphere, which pretty much everyone can agree is wrong, and then violence that is for sport or violence that is for entertainment, which people cheer for. I wanted to create a space that took a look at that, the dynamic between those things, so I started by researching women boxers.”
Over the course of The Wholehearted’s development, Stein and Holum spent time with social workers and women who survived violence in their lives. Holum also trained as a boxer, and this has likely prepared her for the physically demanding show.
“I trained as a boxer, which I’ve been doing for the last four years,” she said. “I met women who were also training as boxers, and many of them got into boxing because they were survivors of violence, either grew up with it or had been attacked. And they were using boxing partially as self-defense, but also as a way of navigating their trauma, finding an outlet for the feelings associated with trauma.”
Together, Stein and Holum have worked on several projects, including Chimera and Man Camp (still in progress). When they begin a theatrical project, the two usually start with conversations, and Holum said they recognize that their best productions come from disagreement.
“If we start a conversation, and it turns out we feel the same way about something, there’s no need for the two of us to make a play about it,” Holum said. “We’re interested in finding material that we really have to grapple with and that we don’t always agree about, and the piece kind of emerges in the space between the two of us. That process is different from piece to piece, and in this particular piece, I was really focusing on the physical life of the character and all of the training and really diving into this physically transformative role. And Deborah got up and running generating a bunch of texts.”
The first day of rehearsal for a play usually involves Stein coming to the space with a bunch of texts that generate the initial conversations. The production designers are part of this process as well.
“Then I pick [the text] up, and I start experimenting with it, and changing it in different ways and thinking about which characters, because I play a number of characters in this piece, which character might be voicing the lines,” Holum said. “The writing is also my body in space and my relationship with the audience and my relationship with all of the design elements, so lights, sound. We composed a bunch of new music for this piece, which was a collaborative effort with two composers.”
She added: “So all of that kind of feeds into the creation of the event, which in the end has a script that’s written down, that someone can read. But in a way that script is kind of the last thing. The completion of that script is kind of the last thing that happens.”
The exploration of these themes continues through April 1 at the Abron Arts Center.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Wholehearted, from Stein | Holum Projects, is currently playing the Abron Arts Center in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
