Sarah Purvis '24 portrays suffragette Aunt George in Rooke Theater. Photo courtesy of Tom Kelleher.
By Oakley Marton ’25
Staff Writer
Last weekend, between the fall festivities, a group of students, family, friends and community members gathered to see a play that promised to transport them across time to the underground world of Victorian women’s boxing. “I really enjoyed watching it — I went back for a second time,” Karuna Prasad ’24 shared with Mount Holyoke News, surrounded by the noise of students, cast and their families. Joy Wilkinson’s “The Sweet Science of Bruising” is the first play of the 2022-2023 season at Rooke Theater. Though the spectacle of boxing draws people into the show, “Boxing evolves throughout the show,” Nicole Tripp ’23, a fight choreographer said. “[In] the beginning, … there’s one winner, every woman for herself. By the end, they find a way — even if not within the ring — to win together. Then at least they have that solidarity.”
“The Sweet Science of Bruising” follows the lives of four women from different social classes in Victorian England who take up boxing to take control of their lives. The audience is introduced to their stories first by Professor Charlie Sharp, played by Mads Nicholson ’23. Nicholson easily switches between telling the audience, with serious melancholy, the professor’s own story of being unable to box due to childhood tuberculosis, to bouncing up as if a circus ringleader to passionately share the stories of the four women and place bets on the next female boxing champion of the world. Gina Pasciuto ’23, whose performance brings grit, heart and authenticity, plays Polly Stokes, an orphan who has had to be a fighter in all senses of the word. Polly grew up boxing with her brother and has always wanted to be champion of the ring.
Another boxer, Violet Hunter, was played by Sarah Rixham ’24, who skillfully portrays Violet’s ambition as a nurse who uses money from boxing to save up for her dream of becoming a doctor, and her frustration and struggle at the obstacles in her way. Matilda “Matty” Blackwell, an Irish woman who uses boxing to escape survival sex work, was played in a compelling, emotional performance by Hannah Itzkowitz ’23. The final main boxer is Anna Lamb — played in a stunning and heart wrenching performance by Linyi Yin ’23 — an upper class woman who realizes she must box to defend herself against her husband, whose prim and proper misogynistic villainy is played expertly by Syd Hart ’25. “It’s a true company performance of people,” Professor Noah Tuleja, director of “The Sweet Science of Bruising,” said. “I like a good fight, probably more than the next person, but that isn’t the thing that most people are coming up to me about. … It’s really the performances. People are very impressed with not just individual performances, but the evenness of the performances across and how in sync they are with each other.”
Pasciuto, who worked with Tripp as a co-fight choreographer, said “One thing I do love about this particular piece is that it is such a fantastic ensemble piece. There’s no one weak link in the cast. Everyone’s working together so collaboratively. It’s a small ensemble — it’s like 10 people — but we’re all building something together. … Mount Holyoke, historically, has done a lot of smaller plays, so it’s nice to see stuff that really focuses on that ensemble cast.” “This ensemble is truly the best,” Yin agreed. “Everyone is so talented, supportive and understanding. … Everyone involved created a safe, fun and supportive environment, which made me at ease to deal with the difficult subjects in the play. Onstage, when I saw my castmates take their moments and shine, it pushed me to match their energy and give my best. [Tuleja], the director, also told us to take our individual moment and show the audience. [He’d say] ‘It’s my time, my story now,’ … I think that’s what the ensemble did, and that’s what made ‘The Sweet Science of Bruising’ a powerhouse production.” Audience members like Prashad agree, too. “It was an amazing production from the set design, to the lighting, to the costumes and you can just really see how much hard work and how much talent this cast had,” Prashad raved after the show.
Secondary characters shine, like Violet’s stern but loving suffragette aunt George, played powerfully by Sarah Purvis ’24, and Mira Thai ’23, who moves seamlessly between very different roles as Anna’s concerned maid and Violet’s upper class novelist suffragette friend who provides comic relief. Liz Almonte ’23 and Glynnis Goff ’25 also play their complicated roles with talent as two men in Violet and Polly’s lives who wish to marry them but have no template for what a relationship looks like without patriarchal control.
As a play that deals with themes such as domestic abuse, it was important for the ensemble to receive direction from an intimacy coordinator, someone “who is hired to coordinate or choreograph any intimate scene on stage determined by what the production thinks needs to be done,” according to Tuleja. “This is sort of a field that allows people to feel … safe in doing what they have to do. It’s not so much about … how [you’re] going to portray this physical action accurately, but it’s how [you can] portray it accurately and feel safe in it.”
Working with an intimacy coordinator was suggested to Tuleja by Assistant Director Piper Kilgore ’23, who, in conversation with visiting lecturer in Film Media Theater Jensen Glick, connected Tuleja with Jeanine Thompson, his former professor of theater at Ohio State University. According to Tuleja, Thompson was one of the first intimacy coordinators to come on the scene. Thompson’s website reads, “In theatre, you can get certified in stage combat, but no one trains or prepares actors or directors to stage the intimate action that is called for in some plays. Jeanine has developed methods for preparing actors to perform the intimacy and for choreographing the intimate action.” Pascuito, who worked with Thompson, said “[working with an intimacy coordinator was] something I’d never done before, so it was really good to get a sense of how it worked, even if they were over Zoom. It’s something that really goes hand in hand with fighting. They’re both just different kinds of touch, so learning how to do it safely, with consent, … figuring everything out as a team and learning each other’s boundaries with everything was … a really cool experience.” Yin, whose character is at the heart of the domestic abuse storyline in the show, said, “Knowing someone is there for me on intimacy-specific issues is already a huge support. Jeanine worked with us through Zoom this time, [but] no matter which form, the very existence of an intimacy coordinator — especially in a play like this — ensured that as an actor, my boundaries are respected and protected, [that] me as an actor, is taken care of. I’m very thankful that we had Jeanine.”
“I was very, very surprised by what she was able to do in a pretty short period of time,” Tuleja said. “I think it gave [the actors] the permission to be able to deal with some of this material and feel safe enough within that environment.”
The environment the intimacy coordinator, cast and crew were able to create shone through to fans.“I really enjoyed the one scene with the Irish woman,” Nikki Hollis ’25, an audience member, said in reference to Matilda’s monologue about survival sex work. “It was just very powerful in the way that she was acting, like you could feel the tension when she was going through her emotions. … It was enough to see the stage makeup [of a bruise] on Matilda’s leg. You can get the gist of what’s happening behind the scenes without seeing the violence right there. The tension is still there, we can interpret it correctly without having to see it explicitly,” Hollis said.
Another patron, Adjoa Baidoo ’24, saw the show every night to support their friends. “The show made me reflect on the things the women in my family have had to go through, … and the amount of nonsense that women especially have to endure and process and just [having] to keep constantly fighting through to stay alive,” Baidoo said.
Pascuito and Yin echoed this when discussing how they connected with their characters. “A big draw from me for [playing] Polly is just that she’s such a fighter,” Pascuito said. “Her whole thing is survival.”
Yin said in doing research for the show, she learned about domestic abuse. After supportive conversations from the cast and crew, she focused on Anna’s fight. “I think the strength and survival instincts in Anna are universal,” Yin told MHN. “If I can center everything around that, then the character may become believable.”
Baidoo reflected: “There’s something about the performances in this show that make you really look at these women who make mistakes, who sometimes aren’t nice, who are rowdy and rough around the edges and hurt and bruised and sometimes sexual, and grieving and happy and joking and so on, and just bask in that truth that women do not have to be perfect to deserve life.”
“The Sweet Science of Bruising” was so popular tickets were completely sold out Saturday night. “This is the first show I’ve directed live here [in] three years,” Tuleja said. “It was so nice to see on opening night how just excited people were — and not just people who came to see the show, but also the cast and the crew and everybody involved. So I just hope that that continues, that sort of excitement and desire to come to the theater and see work. Whether it’s challenging work, or comedic work or whatever it is — it comes back.”