Dreams in White

I reviewed Griffin Theatre's Dreams in White over at Australian Stage. You can read my thoughts here. (Spoilers: I liked it A LOT.)

This Heaven

I reviewed Belvoir St's This Heaven over at Australian Stage. Check out what I thought here. (Shorter review: this show is incredible and incendiary and important and you need to see it. Now.)

milkmilklemonade

Milkmilklemonade runs at the New Theatre from February 5-March 2. By Josh Conkel, directed by Melita Rowston.

Milkmilklemonade is at once fantastical and realistic, funny and moving. It is a show with its own language, one that is quite difficult to acclimate to at first. It is a theatrical language, a melodramatic language, a performative language, one which exposes the problem at the heart of the play: how to be yourself when people are telling you that you should be someone else.

Our hero is Emory (Mark Dessaix), a fifth grade boy who lives on a chicken farm with his dying stuck-in-her-ways grandmother (Pete Nettrell). Emory likes dolls and singing and dancing, dreaming of entering a major pageant-style competition with his Barbie Starlene (Leah Donovan, who also plays several other roles) and his best friend, talking chicken Linda (Sarah Easterman). His grandmother, on the other hand, thinks he should do more stereotypically male things. The other key figure in Emory's life is Elliot (Kieran Foster), sometimes a bully, sometimes a friend, a boy who, despite his aggressive insistence on his own masculinity, loves playing house with Emory and fantasises about going to the prom.

In her groundbreaking work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler talks about the problems of gender and performativity. I won't quote her, because her prose is some of the most dense and impenetrable I have ever encountered, but essentially, she argues that gender is not innate but is performed, forcing people into rigid roles that might not necessarily suit them. We see a classic case of this in milkmilklemonade. Unable to adequately perform the masculine role that his grandmother wants him to, Emory escapes into a fantasy world where he can perform the way he wants to. Sometimes he is co-opted into Elliot's dreamworld, queering the domestic fantasy, exposing more problems with gender performance. According to his grandmother, it is his duty to become a stereotypical man. This is horrifying to him, particularly when read alongside the inexorable destiny of the chickens on his farm, which is to die horribly in a monstrous machine. Emory must find a way to perform like he wants to – to create his own theatrical language for interpreting the world –or his identity, his self, will perish.

Milkmilklemonade could have been a big mess. There's always a danger of taking it too far with this kind of wacky, surrealist humour, of letting the absurdity take over the show like an avalanche. While I suspect the show might still be a bit much for some audience members, Melita Rowston has showed remarkable restraint in her deft direction of this piece. By keeping it carefully controlled, Rowston has allowed the wackiness of it to be funny and absorbing without losing sight of the real melancholy at its heart.

While I was a little apprehensive in the early stages, I ended up really enjoying milkmilklemonade(though I was never quite clear on where the title came from). It's at once completely absurd and a thoughtful commentary on the problems of performing identity. It features some great performances and some really clever direction. Definitely the best play I've seen starring a giant chicken!

 

School Dance

School Dance ran at the Sydney Theatre Company from January 11-February 3, and at Merrigong from February 7-February 9. By Matthew Whittet, directed by Rosemary Myers.

The 1980s are a special decade for me. Not just because I was born then (I was) but because of the memories I have. A lot of people can’t remember their early childhood, but there’s one thing I remember really clearly from mine. The music. My mother was an aerobics teacher, and she used to take me along to her classes when she couldn’t find anyone to watch me. I have a stupid amount of 1980s dance music uploaded in my brain. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I do, it always makes me smile. This is the place that School Dance took me to.

Baudrillard has this idea that things that make us nostalgic allow us to effectively become tourists in our own lives. Like any tourist, we go and see the cool things – in the case of the 1980s, it’s the music and the clothes and the whole retro enterprise – but we gloss over other stuff. It’s really interesting thinking about this alongside School Dance. Sure, on the surface it seems like fun and games and glitter, but there is darkness beneath, very real fears that drive the three boys at its heart – a drunk father, a terrifying bully, and the fear of literally fading into the background forever. It might be a tourist trip, but it’s also a quest. School Dance is at once a relatively realistic take on teenage angst, a surreal piece of art, and a John Hughes movie. It has just the right mix of nostalgia and drama, humour and heartfeltedness, irony and sincerity. It’s at once hilarious and humorous, a tribute and a message.

School Dance is the story of Matt (Matthew Whittet) and his friends Luke (Luke Smiles) and Jonathon (Jonathon Oxlade). They are all losers (of different breeds, as the hilariously meta voiceover reminds us). Matt is so desperate to ask popular girl Hannah Ellis (Amber McMahon, who plays several different female roles in the show) to dance and so equally convinced that she will say no that he begins to become invisible. He, his friends, and an unlikely invisible ally (also Amber McMahon) must overcome dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to get back to the school dance, where Matt must finally step up, be brave, and pursue his desires. Also, there is a unicorn (Amber McMahon again).

The teen genre is often written off for being simplistic, but School Dance clearly exposes that this is not the case. It is a deceptively complicated piece of theatre – beneath all the music and the laughs, there are emotional layers waiting to be peeled back. The invisibility and centrality of Matt highlights the fact that the loser is often the hero in the typical 1980s piece, and his journey shows that just because he is beaten down he is not automatically heroic – Matt must earn his payoff. He must go through a transformative journey to realise what he really wants at that school dance, against a backdrop of glitter curtains, mogwai, and truly radical dancing.

I loved School Dance. I have a lot of nostalgia for the 1980s in me, and I can’t see how anyone who didn’t have a soft spot for the decade of shoulder pads and Martha and the Muffins wouldn’t really enjoy this show. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym talks about nostalgia as “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (8). She also writes that “irony is not opposed to nostalgia” (354). School Dance strikes the perfect balance between the two. It creates the 1980s as an enchanted world, one in which our heroes must go on a quest, and it laughs at itself at the same time. It is at once a fairytale, a Dali painting, a period drama, and a Spandau Ballet concert. Most of all, it is enormous fun, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who even vaguely remembers the 80s. And anyone who went to high school, really – that kind of thing transcends decades and becomes universal.

(Sidebar: Gold by Spandau Ballet is one of the songs I use when I’m in a tough place with my thesis and need to get motivated. I blast it loud and pretend I’m in an inspirational montage from an 80s movie. School Dance made that fantasy that much more potent. Thanks, Windmill Theatre!)

Salome

Salome plays at the Tap Gallery in Darlinghurst from January 28 - February 3 2013. By Oscar Wilde, directed by Andrew O'Connell.

Salome is a difficult play. It is perhaps the most oblique of Oscar Wilde's plays, the meaning of the story of Salome, Herod, and John the Baptist not easy to parse. An interpretation of Wilde's dense text needs to be very carefully thought through, mined for meaning and relevance. Unfortunately, this thinking process is not evident in the production of Salome at the Tap Gallery, and it makes for a confused and stilted show.

I feel that for a show - particularly a show which is a revival or reinterpretation of an older text - to be really successful, there should be a compelling answer to the question, "why this show? why now?" I think there could be interesting answers to this in respect to Salome. Despite the fact it was written over a hundred years ago and set over two thousand years ago, it's not a text that is hopelessly outmoded or outdated. For me, the most immediately notable thing about it is its representation of female desire, and how it casts the desiring woman as both powerful and powerless. This is one possible project for the text, one possible lens via which it could be approached - by no means the only one. However, this production seemed to lack one altogether.

This was immediately obvious in the performances given by the actors. While they as individuals showed flashes of brilliance (though this show was definitely not the best showcase for their talents), there was no real sense of cohesiveness as an ensemble, of direction, of motivation. A lot of the time, I felt like they didn't understand what they were saying, especially in the larger context of the show. It meant that later parts of the show didn't make sense - for example, Salome's desire to see John dead and her declaration of love for him seemed odd, because the build up to it lacked emotional intensity. Motivations seemed to be missing. Several characters were stilted and wooden. This is not the fault of Wilde's text, but of interpretation.

This leads us to the direction. This is, I think, the major reason why the show did not work. It is the director's job to create the vision for the show, to steer it, to decide what project the show should have and make sure everyone - actors, designers, audience - knows what it is. This show didn't seem to know where it was going or what it wanted to do. There was no overarching, cohesive vision evident. The reading of the text was superficial at best and non-existent at worst.

There are other things I could say about the show. I could point out the anticlimactic portrayal of the text’s most iconic moment, Salome’s dance of the seven veils. I could discuss the efficacy of the theatrical device used to bring John’s head to Salome. I might even joke about how the two guards were dressed a little bit like the Dread Pirate Roberts. But there is little point discussing details when the overall interpretation of the text is so confused.

It's really difficult to write such harsh things about an independent show. I fully understand that huge amounts of work go into shows like this, often with very little reward. I am sure this show was a labour of love. However, this production of Salome is nowhere near ready for the stage. A great deal more thought needs to go into it, both about what it is trying to say and how this can be best communicated to an audience. There needs to be an answer to the question, "why this show? why now?" It needs a vision, a project: a direction.  

Rust and Bone

I reviewed Rust and Bone (Griffin Independent and Stories Like These) for Australian Stage - check out what I thought here. (Spoilers - I thought it was awesome.)

My First Time

I’ve already reviewed My First Time over at Australian Stage – you can read my review here – but I have a few more things to say about it than I could feasibly fit into that review. Lucky I have my own blog.

I have two chapters in my doctoral thesis about what I call the virginity loss confessional genre – true tales of virginity loss – so this show doesn’t just fit within my academic interests, it IS my academic interest. There are six books out there which would count as virginity loss confessionals, as well as a bunch of websites, including myfirsttime.com, the website on which this show is based. My First Time isn’t the only show that’s ever been based on a virginity loss confessional – in the West End a couple of years ago, stories from Kate Monro’s (excellent) book The First Time: TrueTales of Virginity Lost and Found (including my own) and her ongoing blog The Virginity Project were dramatised. My point here is that My First Time, both the show and the site, do not exist in a vacuum – since the publication of Karen Bouris’s The First Time and Louis Crosier’s Losing It in 1993, there has been an explosion of virginity loss confessional stories. (One of the more interesting features of the genre is that most authors seem to be unaware that the other texts exist – there’s a real sense in all articulations of the virginity loss confessional that it is telling stories of the first time for the first time. That certainly holds true with My First Time.)

In Telling Sexual Stories, one of the best works in this sparsely researched field, Kenneth Plummer notes that sexual confessionals didn’t really become a common practice until the turn of the millennium. Before this, sex was one of the things you just Did Not Talk About. Sure, there were spheres where it was discussed (anyone who has read Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol.1 will be familiar with this), but talking about your individual sex life to other people? to the public? Not done. Probably the first notable sexual autobiography comes from Rousseau, and he was way, way ahead of his time in that respect. One place you could talk about sex was the confessional, but that functioned largely to measure your sex life against social standards (and if it did not meet them – if you were having socially inappropriate sex, such as sex out of wedlock – then you did penance).

My First Time and other works in this genre also offer a confessional function, but instead of the church providing the yardstick against which sexual experiences should be measured, it is the audience. This is one thing I felt that My First Time was really lacking, and something I wished it explored: why was it important to tell these stories? Why was there need for a website like myfirsttime.com in the first place? Why were people sharing? Why were people talking? And what did they want the audience reaction to be?

There is some merit to presenting stories without comment, which is what My First Time does. But as I said in my review on Australian Stage, it lacks a certain cohesiveness, a through-line. What is virginity? Why is it important? And why are we telling stories about it? These are the key questions at the heart of the virginity loss confessional genre. There is no one answer to these questions. Virginity means different things to different people. They view it differently. (There is excellent research by Laura Carpenter in her book Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences about the different ways in which people view their virginity – as a gift, as a stigma, or as a rite of passage. This is one area that I really wish My First Time had at least touched on, because it is so, so interesting, particularly if you think about how it has changed over time.) And authors within the virginity loss confessional genre have different purposes for telling the stories they do. Some present virginity loss stories almost as morality tales – it becomes a what to do/what not to do guide for teenagers. For others, the project is therapeutic. And for others, it is an exercise in oral history, tracking virginity loss stories over time and looking at how they have changed.

My First Time lacked a project, and that is why, I think, it felt insubstantial. Individually, the stories were hilarious, tender, horrifying, heartbreaking, but why were they being told? As telling sexual stories has become a more common practice, Kenneth Plummer notes that,

“...sexual stories of the Essence, the Foundation, the Truth are fracturing into stories of difference, multiplicity and a plural universe.” (134)

This is certainly presented – and presented well – in My First Time, but why? Why did the storytellers in this genre tell their stories? Why is there an appetite for them? Quite apart from the fact that virginity loss confessionals have become a genre in their own right, there are over 40,000 stories on myfirsttime.com, so clearly they have an audience. And why do we, as an audience, need – and want – to hear them?

I could elaborate on this for many, many thousands of words, but I would probably just end up reproducing a chapter from my doctorate, so I’ll stop here.  For more on what I thought of My First Time as a work of theatre and its entertainment value, go check out my Australian Stage review, where I tried to keep my academic self on the leash a little more! Obviously, for me, this show was of great interest, and I was kind of bewildered that I only found about it a few days before it opened. Whether that was a failing on my part or bad marketing? Not sure. (Though it was probably me.)

One final thing, though: I don’t know who checked the facts that were projected onto the big screen behind the actors but HOLY HELL there were some mistakes in here. Parthenogenesis is absolutely NOT a person who studies virgins and virginity: it means born of a virgin, like Jesus was born from Mary. (Technically, it’s reproduction without fertilisation, but in human terms, that’s what it is.) Studies suggest that virginity pledges make little to no difference in people’s sexual behaviour, except that people who have made a virginity pledge are far less likely to use contraception. There were also some stats in there which just did not sound right to me (not as in a ‘that can’t be true!’ gut feeling, but ‘I’ve read stats for this a bunch of times, and I do not think your stat is right’ way). So, yeah, if you read those facts, don’t go quoting them to people afterwards.