On March 31, the Cambridge Community will host the first-ever Me Too Monologues on the College Park campus.
Me Too Monologues is a documentary theater performance about identity and all the issues that surround it. Students and faculty have been asked to anonymously submit stories about their experiences, and peers will perform their stories as monologues in a theatrical production. This is a national production that has been performed at colleges all over the country.
Sophomore Life Sciences Scholar Maryam Ghaderi decided to propose that Scholars host this event after hearing about the Me Too Monologues from friends.
“I first heard about Me Too Monologues from friends at Princeton, and I wanted to bring the event to Scholars because it seemed like the ideal connector to all the wonderful, existing initiatives within Scholars, such as Real Talk and CCQA, designed to promote empathy and understanding between students,” Ghaderi said. “I think that the event will completely revolutionize the way we think about and interact with our peers. I am hopeful that this increased awareness will be a force of good in our community.”
Ghaderi described the monologues as a cathartic process, because they “focus on intimate, personal experiences and explore narratives that would otherwise be silenced on campus.”
According to the Me Too Monologues website, Duke University student Priyanka Chaurasia started Me Too Monologues in 2009 after attending Common Ground, a Duke diversity immersion retreat that provides open spaces for students to share their own stories and thoughts on how components of identity have affected their time at Duke. She then decided to utilize “testimonial theatre to create a platform” for these experiences to be heard and shared in a public environment.
“The reliance on community storytelling is what makes the Me Too process cathartic and rewarding for all parties involved, from the people who submit the monologues to the performers to the audience, and, thus, is able to reach audiences viscerally and raise consciousness about the structural and personal challenges facing individuals,” Ghaderi said.
Me Too Monologues will be held in room 1200 of the Cambridge Community Center, and Ghaderi hopes this won’t be the last year that the Cambridge Community hosts this event.
“I think that whatever progress we make with this year's event will be a great place to pick up next year and the years to come,” she said.