The suffragettes were angry. So were the women who marched for reproductive rights in the seventies, the ones who showed up for Anita Hill, the millions who flooded streets in pink hats. History tends to sanitize female rage after the fact—turn it into determination, passion, conviction, anything but the raw fury it actually was. But the anger came first. It always does.

Venessa Peruda isn't waiting for history to make her rage respectable. Her solo show All the Rage hits the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival with zero interest in palatability. It runs April 4, 5, 12, and 14 at The RAT as part of FRIGID New York.

"Women's rage has been the catalyst for countless political movements that gave us many of the privileges we have today," Peruda says. "Patriarchy has had a good run, the subjugation and brainwashing has served them for thousands of years, but it's time for us to wake up now. It's time for us to take it all back."

The show arrives at a moment when institutional solutions have visibly, repeatedly failed. Courts reverse protections. Legislators propose limiting women's access to education. Healthcare systems that ignored female pain for generations now market pharmaceuticals as the fix for problems they helped create. The formal channels aren't working. So art steps into the breach—not to legislate, but to name what's happening out loud.

Peruda's approach is blunt. "I'm a clown. I'm an artist. And IDGAF," she says. "I'm someone who is well versed in the pains and absurdities of life. I'm an observer who takes careful notes on the human experience, and is passionate about translating them to others so that they feel seen."

That last part matters. Recognition is half of what the show offers—the experience of being in a room where the unspoken becomes spoken, where the things women absorb daily get dragged into the light. Not for sympathy. For acknowledgment.

"I think it's hilarious and exciting that Patriarchy is so afraid of women's collective power that they banned us from a whole human emotion: anger," Peruda says.

Banned is the right word. Women are permitted sadness, permitted fear, permitted anxiety. Anger gets pathologized, medicated, therapized into something more manageable. Girls learn early to redirect it—into tears, into accommodation, into that particular tight-lipped silence that reads as composure but feels like swallowing glass. The training is so effective that most women learn to distrust their own fury, to see it as a symptom rather than information.

All the Rage operates on a different premise: that anger is data. It tells you something is wrong. It tells you a boundary has been crossed. It tells you the situation is unacceptable. Suppressing it doesn't make the situation better—it just makes you easier to manage.

"Anger is the key," Peruda states. "The greatest trick Patriarchy ever pulled was convincing women their anger was wrong and shameful. When in fact it is the key to our liberation, and the path to rebuild the World. I want to inspire women to change their relationship with their anger, how to meet her without judgement but with full understanding that she's real and valuable."

The comedy isn't incidental. It's strategy. Humor creates distance—just enough to see the absurdity clearly. It also creates connection. A room full of women laughing at the same impossible contradictions becomes, briefly, a room full of women who aren't alone. That's not nothing. In a cultural moment designed to keep women isolated, competing, suspicious of each other, collective laughter is its own small act of resistance.

"Displaying the ironies and pitfalls women are forced to endure is hilarious and cathartic in a pee-yourself-a-little kind of way," Peruda explains. "I'm thrilled to relate to women how we can channel our anger through humor when we feel overwhelmed, helpless, or backed into a corner."

Peruda doesn't soften her own story to make it more comfortable. "I come from a single mom home with siblings who tortured and loved each other fiercely," she says. "I had a difficult upbringing which taught me that humor can not only soothe but bring people together. I was a good kid, until I wasn't. I railed against the World and nearly destroyed myself in the process. Then I worked tirelessly to lift myself out of an old story that said I was supposed to stay small and accept the hand I was dealt."

That phrase—stay small and accept the hand I was dealt—captures precisely what the show refuses. Smallness isn't safety. Acceptance isn't peace. They're just quieter forms of defeat.

"Now I still rail against the World," she adds, "but with a deadly wit and the knowing that I can do great things."

Asked why now, Peruda doesn't hedge. "This question gets me worked up. Because if you have to ask that you're not paying attention. My feed is filled with furious women desperate for answers, for something to do with their inescapable rage they carry with them when they go to work, when they drop their kids off at school, or when they bravely try to go on a first date."

The power question is central. Rage without direction is just suffering. Rage with direction is political. The show doesn't pretend a comedy performance at a fringe festival will topple systems—but it operates on the theory that women who recognize their anger as legitimate are harder to control than women who've been taught to doubt themselves.

"I don't need anyone's permission to scream the truth from the top of my lungs, and don't care if you don't like it—quite the opposite actually," Peruda says. "Women today are sick of the bullshit, and we're here to question, challenge, and ultimately topple old systems that keep us all scared and alone."

There's something clarifying about a performer who isn't interested in being liked. It creates space—for the audience to feel their own feelings without performing acceptability, for the work to land without apology.

"I'm taking the gloves off," she says. "I'm pulling the curtain back to reveal the wizard is a scared man with scrawny legs that probably doesn't pay his child support."

When the approved channels fail, art has always offered another route—not to solutions, necessarily, but to truth-telling. To the naming of what everyone already knows but isn't supposed to say. All the Rage doesn't promise change. It promises an hour where women don't have to pretend, don't have to manage their responses for someone else's comfort, don't have to be anything other than exactly as furious as the situation warrants.

"Women need this catharsis right now," Peruda says. "We need to scream, we need to laugh, and we need to come to an understanding that we absolutely have the power to change things. We need this feral and therapeutic experience to realize we're not alone, and be liberated to be the bitch we wish to see in the World."

All the Rage runs April 4, 5, 12, and 14 at The RAT as part of FRIGID New York. Tickets available through frigid.nyc.

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