What does it mean to be an outsider? An outsider is a stranger, a foreigner, a newcomer. An outsider treads familiar ground but feels excluded, disliked, or somehow unwanted. And the outsiders at Davidson – the brave, the daunted, and the vulnerable – spoke out on Monday night. Through the grassroots organization WE [CAN] (Working to Empower: Campus Activism Network) and a Spike! Grant from Davidson College Friends of the Arts, Davidson students hosted the first Outsiders’ Monologues on Monday, April 14, 2014.
The 900 Room was overfilled with every seat taken and students, staff, and faculty packed together on the balcony and sitting on the floors, as everyone waited for the performance to begin. Written anonymously by various Davidson students and performed by other students who auditioned for parts, the Outsiders’ Monologues are a series of 29 monologues reflecting ways students feel like they do not fit in at Davidson. Only 11 of the 29 monologues published on the Outsiders’ Monologues website were performed at the event. Empowering and challenging us, these monologues explored topics from education to religion, homosexuality to asexuality, and parental absence to family alcoholism. John-Michael Murphy ‘16, one of the event’s organizers, aptly stated in his introduction to the monologues, “We really should have named this event the Outsiders’ Dialogues, because everyone one of you in this audience is engaging in a discourse that has the power to change the culture on this campus.”
One of the most impressive aspects of the monologues was how these pieces were assigned to performers who ostensibly did not seem to represent the characters they were embodying, either through gender, sexuality, or race.
Annalee Kwochka ’15 performed a monologue titled “Ramblings of a Dark-Skinned Girl in a Sea of White Shadows,” the text poetically hearkening to ancestry, craving independence, and asking, “What do you do when you’re not one of the well-known black party girls?” At one point, the monologue stated: “I do not want to be your exotic vacation destination,” and Kwochka’s voice escalated and fell to the words.
Joey Allaire ‘15, strikingly embodied an insecure college woman in his monologue, which began with, “Here are a few of my complaints about myself,” spiraling into a discussion of anxiety, weight, and therapy. The monologue poignantly ended with, “Today, I like myself. Today is Wednesday. I hated myself on Monday. I cried in front of one of my professors on Monday. Sorry, two of my professors…But today, I am happy.” Daniel Hierro ‘17, one of the performance’s organizers, said of Joey’s performance: “It tugged at the part of me that has those thoughts and made me aware that we are in a community that is dealing with things similar to each other.”
For me, the most difficult monologue to relate to was the sixth monologue performed, which weaved together three different voices of students who had lost their parents. Performed by Shuyu Cao ’16, Elizabeth Welliver, ’16, and Cidney Holliday ’15, the actresses’ voices joined together at times, yet drifted apart into personal experiences. “I don’t have anyone to call,” Elizabeth said. “I prayed that God would put those empty eyes to rest,” Cidney said. “I still wait for your calls,” they said in unison. Although I could not relate to the experience of losing a parent, I felt torn and inspired by these students’ performances, feeling the universality of loss and the presence of death.
By transcending these boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and more, the Outsiders’ Monologues demonstrate how we can all empathize with, and in a way, experience what our “Outsiders” feel. These monologues humanize and individualize collective stories. They remind us that we are all fellow students and fellow humans and as such, we should listen to our peers’ stories and befriend people from different backgrounds or beliefs. In a way, by defying conventions of creator-performer, these monologues show how we can lessen the boundary between outsider and insider, between those who feel alone and those who feel included. Though somewhat cliché, the Monologues resonated with their ending message: “You are never alone.”
Murphy said of the monologues: “together they reveal members of our community in expected and unexpected ways.” And he’s right, of course. There were universal concerns: stress, feelings of inadequacy, fear of non-conformity – things we expected to hear. And then there were the less known or understood: asexuality, students who had lost their parents, exhausting medical conditions – and we learned to empathize with these as we attempted to understand.
The monologues simultaneously echoed with confusion, confidence, and cognizance, as they were self-aware yet often uncertain, finding stable ground beneath unsteady soil. For the monologue writers, performers, and listeners, the experience was shared. As one writer said anonymously, “When they started reading my monologue, it took me a moment to recognize my writing. In a matter of a few seconds, I went from being relatively disconnected to being on the verge of tears. He expressed my words the way I had heard them in my head, and I felt relieved at the end, like a strange catharsis.”