Sarah Tuft’s play at the O’Neill imagines Monica Lewinsky as a superhero

July 22, 2018 12:01 am • Last Updated: July 22, 2018 12:05 am

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Sarah Tuft (Photo submitted)

The title for Sarah Tuft’s new play is straightforward and yet amazingly eye-catching: “Marvel-ous Monica; In Which Monica Lewinsky Is a Superhero Hell-Bent On Revenge.”

The story behind the play itself is even more complex and compelling.

Tuft — who is developing “Marvel-ous Monica” during this year’s National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford — was inspired to create the work after reading Lewinsky’s 2014 Vanity Fair article about her experiences, titled “Shame and Survival,” and hearing her 2015 TED Talk (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but the talks now cover almost all topics).

Tuft recalls having a very strong response to that TED Talk — and it resonated with her own life. When she was a student at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Tuft had an affair with a teacher.

“What we forget is that, when people are 17 and 18, they’re really not grown up. The brain doesn’t even fully develop until 29 or 30. I didn’t want to be in that relationship for a good part of it. I just had no agency because you’re still a child, who had a father and who is used to being obedient, at least in my case,” says Tuft, who lived with the teacher. “I very much wanted to leave, and it’s just unfathomable now that I couldn’t, but I really didn’t understand how.”

The incident resurfaced when Tuft moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 2015 and got back in touch with a woman she knew from the Corcoran days. The two of them had opposite reactions to that long-ago teacher-student relationship. Tuft recalls that her friend “was all excited about that memory, and I wasn’t. That same afternoon, when we were reconnecting, I was explaining what that was like for me — traumatic and difficult.”

After hearing that, her friend threw Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article in Tuft’s lap. Tuft read it and realized how much she connected with Lewinsky’s story.

“I related to how Monica was so indelibly marked by her affair with an older man. Although I didn’t suffer the extreme trauma that Monica was forced to endure because her relationship was so public and politicized, my experience impacted me in ways I’m still exploring in my work as a writer,” she says.

Tuft remembers she was so excited about Lewinsky’s TED Talk — but wanted her to go further than she did.

“I was thrilled to see her unbelievable intelligence and poise and finally that the world could see that,” she says. “But I felt on some level that she pulled back that arrow and turned a quarter inch to the left or the right and went to the side of the bull’s eye, that she didn’t quite hit the target in terms of really addressing what had happened to her.”

Tuft says that while she understood that Lewinsky’s second victimization by the media and the public was incredibly traumatizing, it also felt as though Lewinsky still wasn’t ready to talk about the nexus of her abuse, in other words, where it all started: with the affair itself and the ways in which Bill Clinton might be culpable.

Tuft began writing “Marvel-ous Monica,” then, as a way to finish what Lewinsky started. (Tuft notes that Lewinsky herself did eventually address “this complicated and painful side of her past” later, in a January 2018 Vanity Fair essay.)

When Tuft became involved with 365 Women a Year, a project where individuals write about a historical woman so that more women’s stories will be on stages, she chose Lewinsky as her historical figure. As she started on that piece in 2015, Tuft listened to re-enactment tapes of the testimony from when the grand jury investigating then-President Bill Clinton interviewed Lewinsky.

“I was shocked at the kinds of questions they were allowed to ask her. They asked her such personal sexual questions that just had nothing to do with impeaching a president. But they also grilled her about her personal life, like, ‘What’s a nice, vibrant woman like you having an affair with a married man? Why would you go after something that’s not yours, not attainable, not free?’” she says.

Tuft comes from a verbatim theater background — in which plays are built using the actual words spoken by real people — and so began developing a play using elements like the grand jury testimony.

Becoming a superhero

Eventually, though, another completely different idea just came to her: the superhero angle.

She began ruminating about Lewinsky as a superhero who’s trying to save a young coed from a lecherous professor — “which, for obvious reasons, had echoes of my own traumatic incident,” Tuft says. There was a controversy at the time about teachers and students becoming involved, and Tuft says, “I just felt like I wanted to say something about that, about a subtler form of not assault but the imbalance of power that now we all recognize as being part of how the patriarchy keeps women down.”

She mixed fictional elements with some verbatim dialogue and came up with “Marvel-ous Monica.” Putting the pieces together, she says, “has been a puzzle not unlike my verbatim plays but much more fun.”

She initially felt that Lewinsky would have an alter ego who would have more courage than she did as a person and who would do what Lewinsky wished she could do. But Tuft changed that so it’s more about the superhero fantasy being a response to the idea that Lewinsky would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In the play, Lewinsky develops an alternate world where she can right the wrongs.

“For me, from the beginning, I’ve always thought I’m Monica Lewinsky’s avenging angel,” Tuft says. “I’ve been corrected to say ‘advocate’ because her journey is about moving from revenge to forgiveness. I think I really identified with the part that wants revenge. The move into forgiveness is definitely my own journey and one I’m still on in most aspects of life.”

Another character in “Marvel-ous Monica” is the wife of the lecherous professor, who turns into her own superhero — named Nasty Woman. Originally an enemy, she ends up as Monica’s ally.

Discovering playwriting after 9/11

Tuft didn’t begin her professional life as a playwright. In fact, she started out as a painter and photographer, getting her master’s degree in those areas from the Pratt Institute in New York City. She had exhibitions and screenings at New Museum of Contemporary Art and PBS’s Independent Focus. She moved onto writing and directing. Her blogs were published in HuffPost (where she wrote about her 9/11 experience) and The New York Times (where she wrote about surrendering her New York license plate). She directed a number of plays and directed promos and interstitial segments, including a Sundance Channel promo starring Blythe Danner and VH1 ones featuring Tina Tuner and Paul McCartney.

“I have been late diagnosed as ADD. That sort of explains the hopping around. As soon as I mastered a craft, I’d be bored,” Tuft says. “But playwriting has infinite possibilities; you never master the craft because the next play can be a different exploration.”

Her interest in playwriting developed after 9/11. She volunteered at Ground Zero and recalls, “I could not respond to that event in a way that at all invaded privacy — i.e., take a picture — so I started collecting stories. That’s when I happened upon theater. And I have never turned back.”

What she was experiencing at Ground Zero and what she was hearing from the people there varied greatly from what she was getting from the mainstream media. What she saw, she says, “was so much about the human drive toward meaning. There were people who finally had meaning in their life. Money didn’t matter, their health didn’t matter, how much sleep they had. … It was amazing and sort of thrilling to see, even in the midst of the tragedy.”

Her resulting play, “110 Stories,” consisted of first-person accounts and was performed as a benefit for a variety of charities, such as Red Cross for Haiti Relief. It drew a host of famous names to perform it at a variety of theaters. Tuft directed a cast with James Gandolfini, Neil Patrick Harris, Susan Sarandon, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in a 2004 reading at the Public Theater in New York City.

“They all killed it. You don’t have to do much when you’re directing actors like them, just answer their questions and get out of their way,” she says.

#MonicaToo

The emergence of the #MeToo movement has made “Marvel-ous Monica” more relevant, of course, than when Tuft started writing it.

“I totally recognize I have timing on my side,” Tuft says, adding that isn’t something she could have anticipated.

The play, though, doesn’t reference #MeToo because it’s set in 2015 when Lewinsky is preparing to do her TED Talk.

Tuft says that, in “Marvel-ous Monica,” she is representing Lewinsky “as fairly and completely and lovingly as I hope she would want to be represented. Because, in a weird way, she’s my penultimate audience. … I hope she loves the play if she ever sees it. And I hope she feels that it sees her and that it advocates on her behalf with all the love and compassion she brings to her advocacy on behalf of bullied teens.”