Blind drunk at a college party, a blonde-haired, sweet-natured college freshman passes out in a bedroom with the guy she was making out with. The next morning, she finds semen inside her. The girl’s new friend, a strong-willed dual heritage student rep called Nikki, learns about the assault. She goes to the college master, a feminist icon of the Reclaim the Night movement, but is rebuffed with firm advice on ‘correct procedures’ and threatened with security when she refuses to leave. So, Nikki writes about the incident in the student newspaper, without disclosing names, accusing the college of rape culture and racism.

The freshman, Paige, didn’t even want to call what happened to her rape.

Fiona Press and Emily Havea in Wherever She Wanders, Griffin Theatre Company. Photo © Brett Boardman

From this simmering bed of conflicting personal and institutional interests builds Kendall Feaver’s densely layered, provocative and sobering new play Wherever She Wanders. Performed almost 30 years after Helen Garner’s The First Stone inflamed debate, and using a richly seamed intelligence, it grapples with the messiness of the lived realities of consent, assault and sexual freedom, and...