Philly Fringe 2025: Cavelight Productions presents Toni Nagy and Sarah Buckner’s Grape Culture

Nagy and Buckner (a.k.a. Seraphina Supernova) addressed rape culture through an energetic performance with laughs along the way in this year’s Fringe. They began by searching the Drake’s Proscenium theater by flashlight for a female orgasm. It was a funny gag until they noted that you need to feel your body to find an orgasm, and that is impossible when your body does not feel safe. If sexual violence is the reason your body doesn’t feel safe, how can you recover when even talking about that violence also feels unsafe?

As Nagy and Buckner explained, the show’s title is inspired by the grape or purple heart/dot emojis used online to dodge algorithms and moderators that remove content including the word “rape.” Rape culture punishes women for speaking up and seeking justice. It teaches women to believe that their bodies are mostly good for sex, and sex is mostly good for men, as writer Melissa Febos puts it.

Humor, honesty, and informed understanding

Grape Culture demonstrates how this begins in girlhood, with toxic lessons about virgins and whores, limiting models of femininity, lack of information about real or healthy sexuality, and the special flavor of slut shaming leveled at tween girls who develop early. With costumes and props, the performers played out different scenes as mother and daughter, gynecologist and patient, bros playing beer pong, men in suits, and versions of themselves. Nagy and Buckner capably handled the diverse roles, as well as Grape Culture’s shifting formats.

These alternated between storytelling, skits, comedy, crowd work, and dance. The performers were skilled in all, and their dancing particularly stood out. I did not expect it to be so good or effective, as in actually tap dancing around a man’s feelings. However, Grape Culture’s greatest strengths are its humor, honesty, and informed understanding of rape culture and sexual trauma.

The show has lot to say about male entitlement, trauma responses, the impact of rape culture, and how we all play a part in it. Grape Culture ranged from complex concepts to personal accounts. Nagy’s stand-up comic approach to the latter was stronger than Buckner’s confessional videos. These were so raw they seemed out of place, possibly better serving as an accompanying installation.

Rape isn’t part of our culture. It is our culture.

Grape Culture is the first performance about rape culture to cross my desk, though speaking up (and making art) about it is more important than ever. Just before the show, The 19th reported the results of a study on gender roles, suggesting that American men of all ages favor returning to “traditional gender roles” (apparently defined as women staying home with the kids full-time in a mid-20th-century white American ideal). Such desires preclude reckoning with rape culture and its ugly, enduring impacts.

The crux of Grape Culture is “unmasking the ugly truth that ‘grape’ culture isn’t a part of our culture, it is our culture.” This is an important point, and it raises questions about who the show is for. Like Promising Young Woman (2020), the rape-revenge movie starring Carey Mulligan, Grape Culture may preach to the choir. In a just world, men would be seeking out Grape Culture, watching Sorry, Baby, and reading Know My Name. But is American masculinity willing or strong enough to do that work?