A group of women wield retribution on the man who wronged them: eyes are gouged, swords brandished, a gun put to the back of his head. These grindhouse scenarios explode out of Anna Ouyang Moench’s play but it is no Kill Bill caper. Instead, Moench pastiches samurai, horror and gangster genres while exposing the hollowness of such wild revenge fantasies for real survivors of abuse.
There’s a lot else going on in Man of God, which probes themes of online and offline privacy, consent, abuse of power, bulimia and sex trafficking. Moench gets straight into it as, in a Bangkok hotel, we meet four Korean American Christian student missionaries who find a hidden camera in their bathroom. Their fear and fury deepen when they realise it must have been installed by the pastor who is leading them on the trip.
