I am an apprentice in the Ma'yan Political Theater Apprenticeship (aka That's Not Fair), a workshop for teaching Jewish teenage girls like myself about both power, oppression, and privilege, and about creating political theater.  At the end of our performances, we have question-answer-feedback sessions with the audience.  Usually, these are quite friendly and informative.  Sometimes, however, they get a tad dicey.

I learned from this that, when doing a performance piece designed to teach, inform, and change minds, it is important to remember that not everyone already agrees.  If they did, the work would be pointless.  If someone doesn’t get pissed off, you didn’t do your job.  This is important to remember and repeat to oneself when that guy in the back of the room is sneeringly trying to say that women do not deserve equal pay with men.

Yes, believe it or not, this happened to us.  In one part of our show, we briefly mention the salary disparity between women and men doing the same work.  Of all the topics discussed in our show, none of us dreamed that that would be the controversial one.

But it was.  Either someone was intimidated and irritated by the show in general and wanted to start a fight, or he actually believed that “women tend to work fewer hours and not as hard as men do” and that the actual pay-per-labor difference between the sexes is “actually quite small.”

Of course, this surprised all of us a great deal.  Some of us got flustered, all of us got angry, and to be honest, I felt a bit nervous.  Our previous audiences had been so amiable that this was quite a shock. We hadn't yet learned how to deal with things like this--hopefully, now we do.

The purpose of political theater is to ignite questions, debate, and reconsidering of one’s opinions.  Therefore, it is beneficial when someone in the audience is wrong.  This is what one must keep in mind when an audience member claims that “Nancy Pelosi makes more money than any man in the House and she doesn’t work any harder.”