A Profile of Annalise Cain
Written for COM CO 201 at Boston University
Annalise Cain sits on the metal bleachers in Allston’s Ringer Park, strumming a Regina Spektor song on her homemade ukulele. She is wearing a simple dress covered with sunflowers and what she refers to as her “lesbian power ranger shoes”. An opalite crystal hangs on a chain around her neck.
“There’s a shadow, you can’t see my eyes”, she sings in a light soprano. “And the sea is just a wetter version of the skies”.
The shadows that Cain sings about are as much a part of her as the sunflower dress. She is a playwright with a taste for the darker textures of the human experience, and she writes about them with a humor and wit as bright as the crystal around her neck.
As her dramaturg Cortland Nesley puts it, Annalise “wants to make people uncomfortable.”
Her work is set apart by her headfirst dives into the “shadow topics” of humanity– topics which other playwrights would just as soon avoid. “I used to think it was just– honestly just sexual assault,” says Cain on what she’s interested in writing about. “The first longer plays that I spent years on all involved sexual assault in some manifestation. So much to the point where a professor had to be like, ‘I actually like, have to ask if you’re ok,’ and I was like, ‘I’m good, I’m good! I just am not done with this apparently.’”
Annalise is currently in the process of mounting a production of her play “If You Give a Kid a Sucker” in New York. It involves sexual assault, but that’s not the only reason people have been strongly divided in their reactions to the piece.
“I listened to this podcast that just fucked me up! It was about this young pedophile,” says Cain. “He was a virtuous pedophile and he didn’t want to act on his impulses, but there weren’t any routes for him to try to– there weren’t any resources available to him because of how taboo the subject matter is and because of how ‘monstrocized’ [pedophiles] are.”
“He made a comment at the end and he was like, ‘I have an adult partner now and I want a normal life, I want to have kids, who doesn’t want to have kids,’ and I was like (she gasps) I have to write a play right now.”
For the next four years, Annalise worked on many drafts of “If You Give a Kid a Sucker”. The play’s narrator is a young woman named Nadia who is also a self-described “virtuous pedophile”. We learn that as a teenager, she acted on her impulses with a young girl, Missy, whom she babysat. Missy is now a teenager, and she is convinced that she and Nadia are soul mates. She embarks on a road trip across America to find Nadia. Meanwhile, Nadia’s girlfriend Amy becomes pregnant with a baby girl. Amy is unaware of Nadia’s pedophilic impulses and mad that Nadia doesn’t want to be a mother. Nadia starts secretly self-medicating to get rid of her sex drive with disastrous results. Missy reaches Nadia as Amy leaves, and nurses Nadia back to health. The play ends as Nadia meets a small girl on the street and says to the audience, “there’s nothing left now… but to succumb.”
To an outside eye, there might seem to be a disconnect between this young woman strumming her ukulele and the mind that crafted such a darkly complex, morally difficult play. But Cain has been witness to the darker sides of humanity throughout her life.
Annalise’s deep exploration of pedophilia involved both scientific research and personal connections. Cain has a lot of family in child services, and has heard stories of child abuse since she was young. She has a vivid memory of her sister asking her dad how work was one day (her dad is a social worker), and him saying, “Oh, well I had to watch a few hours of child pornography to identify this perpetrator.”
“Sex offenders have been weirdly part of my life for a long time,” Analise reflects. “But not by direct contact.” This combination of objectivity, long term exposure, and personal connection with which Annalise views abuse give her a unique lens through which to write, and has made her an especially powerful voice among playwrights.
Her work has reached some of the top playwriting institutions in the US. Last year, Cain won the National Partners of the American Theatre Playwriting Award, one of the top honors in the playwriting world. At 22, she is one of the youngest recipients of the award, if not the youngest– but she is uncomfortable painting herself in any kind of congratulatory light.
“I got to go to the Kennedy Center over it, and I was very nervous and met a lot of people, embarrassed myself it was fun” she says, stringing these last words together at almost incomprehensible speed.
But there are still those who remain less open to discussion of human darknesses in Annalise’s distinctly ironic, humorous style.
Her play has inspired a lot of strongly negative reactions, particularly among the students and faculty at Boston University, from which Cain recently graduated. “I read it with some students. A lot of people weren’t about it, a lot of people were really like ‘no I don’t like this,’ which was bound to happen.” Despite being awarded at the national level, Cain has also struggled to get the support from her teachers which other, less “controversial” playwrights at the school have enjoyed.
“The puritanical feeling hasn’t quite left here,” says Cain on her frustrations with the artistic world of Boston.
Though she sticks to her guns as a playwright, Annalise does take her audiences’ and collaborators’ feedback seriously. “I think [‘If You Give a Kid a Sucker’] is one of the funniest plays that I’ve written, and it’s had to be to get people through it. There was a three hour version one time, now it’s like ninety minutes.”
For Annalise, one of the main reasons she’s excited to put on a production in New York is for the different perspective that a fresh audience will give her, outside the confines of an institution. “We’re in a bubble here,” she says. “It’s supposed to be a place of freedom, and sometimes it is a place of freedom, but I think especially among student work… [a student audience’s] reaction isn’t gonna be pure in the same way because you care so much about what other people think of you.”
Annalise hopes that New York will celebrate her work. “Crazier shit happens in the streets of New York daily than it does in this play.”