Tag Archives: Little Stormy Productions

Fag/Stag

7 Mar

This is a simple, generous-hearted story of the friendship between a gay man and a straight man. It’s funny and engaging.

For the most part, an overly reductive binary opposition between gay and straight is avoided. Instead, directed by Les Solomon and performed by Nathaniel Savy and Tom Kelly, we get rich portraits of two likeable men.

One of the most intriguing creative choices made in Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs’ script is to reject the convention of presenting a series of dramatic scenes portraying moments in the characters’ relationship. Instead, the two characters directly address the audience, not each other, taking turns to tell us their own version of the unfolding events. This juxtaposition effectively creates humour, but it also makes very apparent to the audience the isolation of the two men, and their differences.

The question is: From where do these differences derive? Because one man is gay and the other straight? Or because, regardless of sexuality, the two men have different psychologies? Or because, at the most fundamental and ontological level, two souls just won’t see the world in the same way – because they have to see it from different places?

The answer is, of course, all three. But it’s the third that’s of particular interest (to me).

Drama struggles to present the inner life of individuals; it’s far more successful in presenting relationships, the life of groups. (If this seems an unusual thing to say, that’s because the Western mind has been so soaked in the dramatic form that this particular presentation of life –  life from the outside – has come to seem entirely natural.)

Though working in an artistic form that privileges the interpersonal, dramatists over the millennia have experimented with ways to represent the personal inner experience. The Elizabethans, for example, embraced the poetic soliloquy. This play, with its beautifully veracious contemporary vernacular, is a fine modern descendant of that experiment.

And so, regardless of its humble focus on the garden-variety experiences of finding romance and friendship, what an experiment like Fag/Stag does is explore one of the greatest of miracles: how we make a connection with others, despite the isolation of our rich but singular inner lives.

Paul Gilchrist

Fag/Stag by Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs

Presented by Little Stormy Productions in association with Lambert House Enterprises,

At the Substation, Qtopia, until 21 March

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image supplied.

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God’s Cowboy

5 Feb

There are times in God’s Cowboy when you could be excused for thinking that budget considerations alone have determined the costuming choices – though you might wonder how much is really saved by not providing the actors with shirts.

I’m being silly, of course. The costuming is fine. The actors do have shirts.

Though they do take them off.

A lot.

Gay male theatre often has a lot of bare chests. That’s partly because such theatre is a celebration of the diversity of human sexuality. (One unintended consequence of this is that straight audiences can be left with the impression that gay men are obsessed with sex  – which is to miss the salient point that theatre celebrating gay sexuality is still making up for the millennium and a half in which our culture pretended gay sexuality simply didn’t exist. Except, of course, for the times when it was acknowledged so it could be persecuted.)  

Though a paean to difference, gay theatre is also an assertion of kinship. It says In some ways my life may be different from the majority, but I share the same joys and face the same challenges.

In Les Solomon’s play, the universal joy is love, the challenge abuse.

Gentle, naïve twins Penny (Sophia Laurantus) and Peter (Nathaniel Savy) audition for a show. They’re successful, and join a cast filled out by the charismatic Daniel (Max Fernandez) and the disturbing Demetrious (Tate Wilkinson Alexander).

Peter and Daniel begin a showmance – but Daniel’s back history makes it difficult for him to give Peter what he needs.

Under the direction of Ella Morris, performances are engaging (though the pacing could be sharpened to make more of both the humour and the rising tension.)

The story is simple and appealing. Ironically, it could be argued the script needs both a trim (to stick closer to the chase) and a fleshing out (to answer some questions, especially regarding Daniel’s revelation to Penny and the response it invites.) But these supposed faults could be exactly how Solomon’s script achieves its winsome mood of wistful nostalgia.

For me, the most enthralling aspect is the presentation of that eternally uneasy relationship between love and sex.

There’s a wildness about sex, a physicality that has a disturbingly soft border with violence. Excitement is its bright side, abuse its dark.

The play represents several attempts by characters to tame this wildness: Peter and Penny valorise romantic love; Peter is a refugee from the dependable dream-land of classic movies; Daniel’s cowboy swagger safely repackages threat as confidence; and Daniel, as his character in the play within a play, cheekily posits a God who has gifted us sexuality and who wants us to enjoy it in every-which-way-we-can.

Provocatively, the Daniel of the dressing room also posits a God, though his spirituality has less of the cowboy about it, being rather a soul-stretching awareness that the divine gift of joy comes wrapped in moral responsibilities.  

Paul Gilchrist

God’s Cowboy by Les Solomon

Produced by Little Stormy productions in association with LambertHouse Enterprises

At Flight Path Theatre until Feb 21

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by David Hooley  

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