Red Yarn, Bind Her
By: Francie Cohen and Gabriel Gononsky
Red Yarn, Bind Her is about the silence, the hesitation, and the complicity we face when confronted with someone else’s suffering. It’s about the way victims—especially women—plead for help, tell their stories, and ask for someone to believe them, only to find that no one listens. No one acts. And if someone does, it’s often too late, or it’s just a passing gesture, a token effort.
It's about the voices of women—especially victims of sexual assault—being dismissed in places where their pain should be heard the loudest, like in courtrooms. They stand in front of men who speak over them, who question their motives, who downplay their trauma. They hear the same old justifications: "She must have been asking for it," or "She was drunk," or "She didn't fight back enough." The stories of their suffering are reduced to nothing but noise, while the men who perpetuate harm sit in positions of power, protected by a system that consistently fails to uphold the dignity of those who suffer. This silence, this dismissal, this disbelief—it’s a familiar, suffocating reality for so many survivors of sexual assault.
Nothing in this piece has been prefaced. There are no explanations, no context given in advance. What you witness is meant to unfold without warning, to place you in the same position of uncertainty and choice that the characters experience. This is intentional. The absence of explanation is the core of this performance—the rawness, the immediacy, and the invitation for you to be fully present in the moment, without preconceived notions.
In this performance, it’s up to the audience to make a choice: to respond to the text on the screen, to hear the call for help, and to decide whether to do something about it. The scissors are there, so close, but will anyone pick them up? Will anyone take the responsibility to cut the threads that bind her? Or will they remain frozen, paralyzed, like so many who choose to look the other way when someone’s pain becomes too uncomfortable to confront?
It’s a harsh reflection of the reality victims live through—when they ask for help, when they scream their truth, but it falls on deaf ears. It’s about how we as a society often let those cries go unanswered, how women’s voices are drowned out by excuses, lies, and the bullshit that men perpetuate in places where justice should be served. It’s about how survivors of sexual assault are often made to feel like the problem is theirs: they should’ve fought harder, they should’ve been more careful, they shouldn’t have gone to that party, worn that dress. The guilt of that inaction becomes woven into the fabric of their lives. The audience is given the same choice: Will they step in, or will they stay silent, just like everyone else who has failed in the past?
The performance asks you to reflect on your own role in this. When someone is hurting, when someone is asking for help, what do you do? Do you hear their voice, or do you let it disappear into the background? Red Yarn, Bind Her doesn’t just ask what will happen to Francie—it asks what will happen to us if we don’t do something. Will we continue to let the cycle of sexual assault persist, or will we be the ones to break it?
