Loving You Until It Hurts

The Artistic Home’s BEATEN

When entering the Artistic Home’s new space at Grand and Noble, I was given a playbill and went to my seat in a small but well utilized, black box theatre. The playbill had a comic book style depiction of a nerd dreaming of saving a damsel in distress with the words ‘BEATEN’ in dynamic font across the top. The lights faded and Greg, a nerdy young man in a captain America t-shirt and thick-rimmed glasses, stood center stage and delivered a monologue filled with pop culture references and satirical humor. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this play was not really about the nerd who gets the pretty girl. In fact, it is about three generations of women dealing with physical and emotional abuse, with a slightly misleading prelude.