Crack 2009. Image by Talsit.

Crack is a national festival and forum for independent and emerging performing artists, taking place annually as a part of This Is Not Art in Newcastle. Gillian Schwab, Ben Packer and I co-direct the festival, with the support of our extraordinary tech coordinator Anthony Arblaster and a raft of radical volunteers.

Crack has grown a lot in its brief lifetime. After breaking into the This Is Not Art scene in 2007 as a series of interventions designed to interrupt the National Young Writers Festival, Crack sprouted arms, legs and teeth. In 2009 the NYWF kicked it out of the nest to become its own independent festival under the direction of Gillian and myself.

This year, the festival is finding hair growing in funny places and feeling emotions it’s never felt before. Assailed by strange urges and desires, feeling like a freak in the company of its fellow festivals and too awkward to talk to the opposite sex, it seems as if no-one understands what Crack is going through. There’s only one way to express these feelings: anti-social behaviour. So no-one knows what it’s like being an emerging / experimental Australian theatre artist at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century: well, we’ll show them. We’ll show them all.

Queer DIY-theatre duo Sisters Grimm premiere their new show The Rimming Club as part of Crack 2010

Over four days (Thursday 30 September - Sunday 3 October) from its base in Newcastle’s old Masonic Lodge, Crack will unleash a blistering program of performances, gigs, panels, forums, workshops and interventions by an array of Australia’s most creative and accomplished theatre artists, including Sisters Grimm, The Last Tuesday Society, Shh, and The Masters of Space and Time.

This year’s festival concludes on Sunday 3rd with our very own Year 12 Formal, a free-for-all participatory performance in which audience becomes performer, performer becomes audience and the hormones flow as freely as spiked punch. Curated by famed deviant Hadley and featuring light, sound, music and chaos by the Spill Collective, Svelt, Dead DJ Joke and YOU. Don’t hold back: turn a nightmare into a night out!

Check out the full schedule of events on the Program page, or have a butcher’s at this year’s lineup on the Artists page. Do it all, do it right now!

Shh’s Genty-inspired physical theatre / puppetry performance Blind, As You See It features as part of Crack 2010

First and foremost, the Finnigan and Brother page now features more than twenty tracks for you to download, from the epic 2008 radio/guitar jam Not Face to our recent live set on Sydney’s FBI Radio. As well as audio, you can view footage of the lo-fi psychedelic light and sound jams from our 2009 EP Golden Globe.

I have also uploaded a battery of my solo audio work, including a selection of pieces created with the FM/AM radio, and four extended mixes of spoken-word/music.

For those that prefer the music in their life Sauropod-flavoured, the Dinosaur Concept Album can now be downloaded in its entirety. This record features a range of skilled collaborators, lending their prowess to this homage to the Thecodont and the Thecodont’s lesser-known cousin, the Dinosaur. And if songs such as Protoceratops (with Reuben Ingall) and Pachycephalosaurus (with Grahame Thompson) simply excite your desire for further Saurian music adventures, you can download tracks by Diplodocus (myself, Chris Finnigan and Paul Heslin), from our EPs You are KGB, aren’t you? and First Handshake in Space.

The Collaborations page features a selection of one-off creative experiments with a variety of awesome musicians/sound artists. The Fight Fire With Knives page includes a selection of audio, images and words from the brief lifespan of this gloriously chaotic music/sound/art/theatre/cooking experiment. Lastly, the Donut Gringo Avenger Boys page includes a swathe of interviews, reviews and selected recordings from this longstanding duo of Mick Bailey (The Man Who Hates Fun) and myself (The Fun Who Hates Man). Get amongst.

We were hit last night by a bolt out of the blue when we stumbled upon Peter Wilkins’ just-published review of True Logic for Lowdown (the national magazine for youth performing arts in Australia). Go to the website to check it out, or read a sample of the text below:

Cathy Petocz as Jen Howe. Image by Mick Bailey.

How to unravel the riddle? That is the puzzle. What has brought an assayer, a data processor and a journalist together in a 19th century study? Why are they obviously modern day characters and yet are dressed in Victorian clothes? Why do they appear disoriented, confused, scrambled and bewildered by recurrent loops in their dialogue, interfacing with voice overs of their real persona’s existing in an outside world? Trapped within the virtual reality of a computer construct, the mystery slowly unravels, revealing the reason for their existence, their relationship to each other and their mission to serve a robot government in order to solve the major social, political and economic problems of their world at a time in the not too distant future.

Stoppard meets Beckett in an Orwellian world in Boho Interactive’s science fiction thriller, True Logic of the Future. Canberra’s science theatre collective has already established an enviable reputation for incisive, conceptual exploration of scientific and technological experimentation in previous productions, such as the highly acclaimed A Prisoner’s Dilemma, based on Game Theory probability; and Food for the Great Hungers, which examined the notion of historical consequence, performed as an interactive journey through the Canberra home of late historian, Manning Clark.

True Logic of the Future, although appearing complex in its dramatic structure, is deceptively simple and strikingly relevant. Society faces a complex, scrambled and incoherent network of natural, humanitarian and political problems. What logical paradigm needs to be employed to construct rational and affirmative solutions?

True Logic of the Future seeks to offer no didactically driven solutions. But it does strive to empower the audience through interactive participation or intellectual confrontation to construct informed answers to the essential premise. How can we solve this problem?

Throughout the performance, the action is interspersed with digital on-screen instructions, operated by Michael Bailey who also provides a sonorous trombone accompaniment to the characters’ search for reason in an apparently illogical environment. At intervals, the audience is asked to break the incoherent loops of simultaneous or overlapping dialogue by stamping their feet; determining a sequence of scenes; or plunging into chaos as they urgently attempt to keep an increasing number of balloons afloat while Sands exhorts them to imagine they are a government, charged to solve problems such as the refugee crisis, the erosion of the soil, tidal surges that destroy coastal communities, the creation of social problems leading to the employment of martial law, which in turn leads to the destruction of social order and the emergence of uncontrollable anarchy.

Boho Interactive’s theatre challenges and provokes. It demands rational explanation of irrational logic, and compels audiences to understand responsible commitment to direct action. Theatrically, True Logic of the Future is compelling, confronting and intellectually challenging in its relentless analysis of human complexity. It is a theatre of ideas, intriguing in its construct, imaginative in its staging, and prophetic in its pronouncement of the global and national issues that will determine the future prosperity and security of the nation.

- Peter Wilkins, 9 August 2010, Lowdown Magazine

At 9pm we rambled in to the studio and met Brooke Olsen, producer and presenter for FBI’s ‘weekly journey into the nether regions of sound’, Sunday Night at the Movies. Clambered around the studio for a few minutes plugging in cables and moving microphones, then launched into a short live version of The Goddamn Kings of Leon, Finnigan and Brother’s loving re-enactment of the Kings of Leon’s spectacular onstage meltdown at the Reading Festival last year.

Some conversation with Brooke about our work (short summary - we steal shit from everywhere and staple it together in a mad rush before racing off to steal the next thing), then we kicked into the reason for our trip, the premier performance of our new 20 minute work Solar System.

Solar System is a prison-break story in which the Earth breaks free of its orbit and runs from the sun out into the dark. It’s a dense, tangled journey through an array of fragmentary songs and stories, from natural history lesson (how did the moon come to be orbiting the earth?) to language-deconstructing sound poems to bileful music video critiques to religious propaganda pop songs (’…if the Orthodox Coptics know what’s what, your number’s up and you fucked up…’) to high-speed action sequences (breaking into the aquarium and punching the fish!). All of which is shadowed, tailed, lifted, carried, turned inside out and spun in circles by the music, a frayed tapestry of glitching soundscapes, punchy riffs, psych solos and eerie melodies, bleeding and dissolving into one another in constantly shifting shapes orbiting around Chris’ loop-station and FX pedal.

This performance was fun. Of the three headphones in the studio, only one worked, and Brooke generously lent it to Chris. That meant that only one of the three of us could hear the music, and it wasn’t the show’s producer. Without any sense of the sounds Chris was making, I performed the whole piece on instinct, following Chris’ facial cues and getting timing from the movement of his hands. It was intense, and once or twice we could feel the piece nearly slipping out of our hands, but the needle stayed in the groove and we made it home before 2am, listening to Burial and an early live recording of the Verve. Rain on Lake George in the dark.

Download:

Finnigan and Brother - Solar System (live on FBI radio 2010).mp3 (12.6mb)

Finnigan and Brother - Goddamn Kings of Leon / Interview (FBI radio 2010).mp3 (6.1mb)

Ira Gamerman writes good things which you ought read.

First of all, American comrade-playwright Ira Gamerman has launched his own website, featuring a battery of information and background on his work. What you need to do is contact Ira to request a copy of his full-length SPLIT, which he brought to the World Interplay festival in Cairns last year. It’s one of my favourite playscripts of ever, and as far as I know it’s never been produced outside the US and don’t you see this is your chance? Also bug him for a copy of Dated: A Cautionary Tale for Facebook Users (because you’ve seen enough embarrassing attempts at exploring social networking in live performance, you may as well see it done right) and Play (by play by play by play by play by play by play), because it’s drawn from Samuel Beckett’s stunning Play and it features me as a lecherous douche. Well worthwhile.

Secondly, Melbourne comrade-playwrights Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Glyn Roberts have launched their own Writers Theatre. Based on the Royal Court Theatre in London and Griffin Theatre in Sydney, the MKA Richmond is intended to showcase the best emerging playwrights and scripts. The MKA launches this November with a month of back-to-back play readings, before kicking off its 2011 season with Vedrana Klepica’s JATO. To which I say: fuck yeah.

Jen Williams (right) and sisters in Illyria Productions’ Bronte. Image by Rosie Woodford.

Lastly, Sydney comrade-playwright Jen Williams and her company Illyria Productions opened their production of Bronte at the ATYP Theatre on the Wharf last week. Polly Teale’s script tells the tale of Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte, their lives and how they came to be such renowned literary figures in our culture, but really the show is an exploration of how many fucking fly things you can do when your set is made entirely out of books. It’s on until August 7 - go see go see go see.

Alright, now to the selfish me-related news.

thank you, Sydney heatwave that forced us to go shirtless and thereby look like a pair of horrible fratboys
about to pour beer on each other in a Hilltop Hoods moshpit

Finnigan and Brother, the duo of my brother Chris (guitar/FX) and my self (words/handheld radio) is presenting a live set on FBI Radio in Sydney this Sunday 1 August. We’re featuring on Sunday Night at the Movies, FBI’s ‘weekly journey into the nether regions of sound’ from 9-10pm, hosted by Brooke Olsen. We’re premiering a new work we’ve been devising entitled Solar System, as well as our re-enactment of the loveable Kings of Leon’s onstage meltdown at the Reading Festival last year. Bless them for their commitment to their craft, their devotion to one another and their endless ability to humiliate themselves for my amusement (see pigeons shitting in Jared’s mouth incident).

Solar System features abstract sound poetry (thank you Steve Reich’s Come Out), real-life science history (the story of how the moon came to orbit the earth, to be precise) and high-octane action sequences (punching stingrays and fly-kicking a swarm of bees), with just enough room left over to abuse Rage guest-programmers for their unimaginative music video selections. A brief sample to whet your appetite:

This is a prison-break story in which the earth tries to break free from the sun and run from the solar system into the dark. It starts the night that each of the planets gets a new guitar.

Venus says ‘I want to form a White Stripes covers band and play Seven Nation Army at every school assembly.‘

Mars says ‘I want the 12-string shaped like a crocodile so I can play planet blues.‘

The sun says ‘The Earth doesn’t get one.‘

The sun yells all the time: ‘Scrape me clean, Mercury! Venus, recite Springsteen lyrics to me! Mars, kidnap children from their parents at Disneyland!‘

Chris: ‘These photos mean that I can never run for prime minister.‘

We’ll be on-air from 9.10pm - 9.40pm EST. If you’re interested, tune in to 94.5 FM if you’re in Sydney, or stream the show via the internet if y’re not. If you’re curious about this whole Finnigan and Brother thing, you can read the whole story, listen to tunes and check out our videos here - do it.

image by ‘pling

Science-theatre ensemble Boho Interactive is the company I co-run (with fellow deviants Mick Bailey and Jack Lloyd), and True Logic is the show we have been developing for the last nine months, along with Gillian Schwab, director barb barnett and performer Cathy Petocz. For a good background on the play (and an awesome retrospective on the company), check out Na Milthorpe’s article in the July issue of Exhibitionist.

The Canberra season of the show finished last night, with a short break before we take it on tour to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney as part of the Ultimo Science Festival. It were an intense, exhausting and exhilarating week, with packed houses and audiences testing every aspect of the play’s interactive components, but the responses from punters have been really encouraging. Initial reviews have been grand, too - here are a smattering:

Cathy Petocz as Jen Howe. Image by ‘pling.

Trevar Chilvar, Australian Stage Online

Nothing pleases me more than to have my ideas of what constitutes good theatre challenged, and the talented and immensely clever cast and crew of True Logic of the Future have done just that. This is a creative and intricately constructed performance that presents many challenges for the reviewer, not least of which is the question of whether it should be reviewed at all.

The work is driven by the ideas of William Stanley Jevons, a nineteenth century philosopher whose work had substantial impact across a number of fields. While this is a potentially didactic and dry theme for a play, it is nonetheless a fascinating experiment when it is turned on its head to be about the audients’ capacity for rationality. And so rather than emotive elements like character and plot providing the work’s movement, this is provided by the audience’s interaction. The play insists that the audience, wherever they’ve come from, is capable not only of understanding Jevons’ ideas, but of constructing them. A far more interesting proposition than the story of a dead man’s life.

And far more interesting than the portrayal of dead man, the three onstage writer/performers; David Finnigan, Jack Lloyd and Cathy Petocz are simply remarkable. With a script that can change direction at a moment’s notice, depending on audience interaction, and clearly defined objectives, their professionalism is of the highest standard. They are likewise supported by musician Michael Bailey, without whose sense of the moment their performances would fall flat.

Some might argue that True Logic of the Future, as a production developed in conjunction with a museum, isn’t really theatre; but I think it rather challenges us to define what theatre really is. At the end of the day (or the performance), what really matters is the nature of the experience and how, as a member of an audience, you’ve related to it. True Logic of the Future takes ideas that are philosophically dense, and not only presents them in a narrative that’s easy to relate to, but also provides engaging experiences that illustrate their point. While this may not suit fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, it is nonetheless the heart of theatre; it’s what keeps theatre alive.

As theatrical experiences go, this is among the most enjoyable I have ever had. The way in which the performers draw the audience into participation so effortlessly ignited a sense of playfulness and wonder most commonly associated with childhood, and while other experiences may impress with language, skill and profundity (as this one does), I simply found myself incredibly grateful for the awakening of my sense of wonder.

image by ‘pling.

Cris Kennedy, The Canberra Times

Locally-based video artist Jack Lloyd, musician Michael Bailey and writer David Finnigan work together as a collective, calling themselves Boho Interactive, and explore science through performance. Their 2007 work A Prisoner’s Dilemma looked at the science of game theory, while their 2009 installation Food for the Great Hungers was informed by complex systems science as it re-imagined 20th-century Australian history.

Their new show, True Logic of the Future, is the result of a residence at Belconnen Arts Centre and a partnership with the Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse has contributed a reproduction of the Logic Piano, something of a Jules Verne-era computer, designed and built by the great 19th-century thinker William Stanley Jevons, and through the narrative the Boho Team explore the life and scientific and economic theories of Jevons.

Before I enter the performance space, purpose-built in austere timber and calico by show designer Gillian Schwab, the usher warns of the interactive nature of the show, but reassures audiences participation isn’t mandatory. The set is a Victorian-era drawing room, complete with performer David Finnigan silently encouraging the crowd to search among the set to uncover key props whose relevance will become apparent during the show.

Finnigan is joined on stage by Cathy Petocz and Jack Lloyd, playing, respectively, journalist Jen Howe and statistician Alex Moore. The three characters come to realise they are avatars working within a computer environment, in reality the scanned consciousnesses of real citizens at some point in our not-to-distant future, and their role is to help calibrate the computer’s settings of a new Big Brother entity who will control government decision- making.

All of the backstory to Boho’s research for this show the work of Jevons, the plausibility of their future scenario constructs, the wonderful period reproductions by the Powerhouse gives you a richer experience as a viewer (or, if you get involved with the interactives, a participant). But you don’t really need to know any of this going in: the team don’t wear their intellectualism on their sleeves. Instead, under director Barb Barnett, they have simply produced a fine piece of drama that explores some of our bigger challenges as a society the loss of anonymity, of power, and control of our environment.

The actors are terrific, there are some nice little conceits possible in a sci-fi show, like the characters playing against their own inner monologues, and Michael Bailey sits obscured among the audience, pressing the buttons and pulling the switches like a soulful trombone-playing Wizard of Oz.

image by ‘pling.

In addition to these sanctioned efforts, there have been some insightful discussions of the play on various blogs. Check out Michael Sollis’ Island Universe, Tom Worthington’s Net Traveller and Ross Hamilton’s Wordsmiff.

Lastly, thanks to everyone that came to the show, for taking a risk on what is easily one of the weirdest performances I’ve ever been involved with. For anyone in Sydney this August, the season runs Saturday 21 - 28 (yes, opening on election day - the stars have totally aligned for us), Bookings through the Powerhouse Museum.

‘Campbell’s Wharf’. Pictorialisation courtesy: Mr William Stanley Jevons (deceased)

Since September 2009, Boho (myself, Jack Lloyd and Mick Bailey) have been in residence at the Belconnen Arts Centre researching and devising this new work. True Logic combines narrative theatre, game-based interactive sequences and a live soundtrack of trombone / electronica into a taut science-fiction thriller.

The play takes place in the near future, in a city on the brink of collapse. Refugees fleeing rising sea levels and coastal floods fill the city, while drought is turning the farmland into desert and crops are failing. As the city’s infrastructure buckles under the strain of the added population, food, water and medicine are growing scarce. Demonstrations turn into protests, protests turn into riots, and the desperate population prepares for violence and looting.

Battling crisis after crisis, the government are losing their grip even as the city crumbles beneath them. In the face of mounting emergency, the city’s leaders propose a drastic solution to the city’s problems; a last-ditch alternative to disaster. But even while the government’s last-ditch plan provides an escape route from the city’s spiral into chaos, the cost of carrying it out is desperately high.

Finding themselves in a 19th century study laden with bizarre artifacts, three strangers - radical journalist Jen Howe (Cathy Petocz), idealistic bureaucrat Alex Moore (Jack Lloyd) and assayer Will Sands (David Finnigan) - are asked to help activate a computer program.

An illustration of the cloud chamber devised and constructed by Mr William Stanley Jevons

As Jen, Alex and Will grapple with Victorian-era scientific instruments such as the Logic Piano and the Cloud Chamber, they begin to unravel the mystery behind the strange glitches affecting their environment and their selves. Willingly and unwillingly, each character reveals secrets about their lives and provide glimpses of the city’s descent into chaos. As the significance of their task becomes clear, the trio are forced to make a desperate decision which will shape the future of their society.

What is your freedom worth? What would you sacrifice to be safe?

Boho is David Finig, Mick Bailey and Jack Lloyd. image by ‘pling.

Created in partnership with the Powerhouse Museum, and featuring director barb barnett, designer Gillian Schwab and performer Cathy Petocz, True Logic will premiere at the Belconnen Arts Centre from July 13-18 before touring to Sydney for a season at the Powerhouse Museum as part of the Ultimo Science Festival from August 21-28.

Visit bohointeractive.com for more information and booking details.

my self. image by deye aus.

First of all, I performed my poem Who are you standing at the microphone talking to the people anyway? which I went on to perform at the finals in the Sydney Opera House - check out the video of that performance. Omar performed his poem Visions -

How can I tell my baby boy to learn Malay,
but when I call up my grandma, I have nothing to say?

By mad fortune, at the end of the night Omar and I were tying in first place. We had to each perform another poem as a tie-breaker. Omar performed his post-Cronulla-riots piece Open Your Eyes, which opens with a quote from Dr Dre’s post-LA-riots track The Day the Niggaz Took Over:

Sitting in my living room, calm and collected,
feeling mad, I’ve gotta get mine respected.

I didn’t have a second poem prepared, so I was scrambling madly through my notebooks for something that might work. Finally I tore two pages out of my book and stumbled up on stage already reading from them. My nervous performance, a high-speed summary of the Earth’s early years, somehow scored enough points for Omar and I to tie again - at which point the judges said fuck it, and sent us both to the Opera House.

what you can’t see in this image is the wreckage of the Opera House which Omar was laying to waste

At the finals, of course, Omar calmly and coolly blitzed the event, scoring first place and taking off to perform at the 2009 Ubud Writers Festival in Bali. It was an extraordinary performance by a blisteringly skilled artist, one of my favourite poets both written and live. Omar has spent the last eighteen months floating around the planet writing, recording and if I’m not mistaken, producing a new record - to be released on July 6 before he goes on tour supporting Gil Scott-Heron in Germany. Just… extraordinary.

Back on my own nostalgia trip: the tiebreaker poem which fluked me a spot in the Australian Finals was retrospectively titled World Creates Itself, and I have reproduced it below in all its informative glory. Dig!

world creates itself

All right then, let’s get to grips with the reality of time a-passing - time a-passing - time a-passing - and time’s a-passing -

First of all you have a sun - a star - somewhere in the outer fringes of the galaxy, spinning around in a wheel that turns once every 250,000 years - and round that star is spinning a great wheel of gas, dust, rock, ice and grit -

With your excellent eyes you can see it spinning, with your excellent eyes you can see it spinning -

Now all these specks of dust and ice and grit are whirling together at high speeds in great curves around the sun and ever so slowly, ever so gently, the force that is gravity draws two of them together - two particles flying alongside fly closer and closer until they stick together - and this is the inception of a planet - because now over many years that tiny ball of grit attracts other specks and spots to it, and all those little flecks of gas and rock swooping together around the sun begin to conglomerate -

- do you know that word - conglomerate? -

- into loose clusters of metal gas and rock - into a rough sphere -

First Jupiter, separating itself out of the whirling mess, then Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - and then much later, the high speed spittle flicking right around the sun - Mars, Earth, Venus, fucking Mercury -

So the Earth conglomerates - do you know what that means? - and the heavier fragments, the iron and the nickel, they sink right to the heart of it and the rock and the mud, that bulges around the outer edge, and the lighter stuff still - the gas and the H 2 O - floats around the shell in a huge cloud of vapour.

Oh the moon, you’re right, the moon! But not that I forgot, just that the moon hits… now.

A huge flying rock one third the size of the forming earth careens somewhere out of the solar system and slams into the earth, but right now there’s no surface, you know what I mean, there’s no crust, so it just bombs into this bubbling ball of molten magma and splashes -

- up sprays this spurt of splashed up lava into orbit which rolls up into a ball - that ball is the moon - so what you’ve got to remember is that the moon is not a meteor that came out of space - the meteor that came out of space went into the earth and the moon is the liquid rock that got splashed up out of its way -

You understand, of course, that this world doesn’t need someone like god to make it happen, and it doesn’t need you as the ghost in its fucking shell. The world creates itself, it is tough like that.

image from ‘Astro 1: Slides for Class 1‘

image by frosty

Through the rehearsal process, director Steve Barker, performer Matt Kelly and stage manager Natalia Thomas workshopped and fine-tuned the Underage House Party Play script. The result is a far more effective and well-structured play, with my stream of consciousness ramblings fitted to a tight theatrical frame. Unfortunately, the short rehearsal period and my working schedule meant that I was unable to attend or participate in these workshops. For that reason, when a scene or a set of lines didn’t work, I was not on hand to edit and redraft.

In almost every instance, Steve’s edits accorded exactly with my vision - he understood what I was trying to convey, and conveyed it better than I had. Only once did a script alteration jar with me, and the reasons for and against the change are I think interesting and worth discussing.

The scene in question is the sex scene: 4.30am at the house party, Manson Lane and Gwen Malkin are getting it on for the first time in their host’s bedroom. Lane briefly lost his erection while putting on a condom, but a few gentle strokes and he’s ready to go. This is the original version of the scene:

Gwen - Are you all right?
Lane - Yeah, I’m good, it’s - I just need a second -

Alright, partial success - now Lane goes in to penetrate, but he can’t find the entrance to Gwen’s vagina. This is something porn has not taught Lane - where exactly in the slit is the vaginal opening? And while Lane’s struggling, Gwen’s lying back feeling awkward, not wanting to take the lead but after feeling his dick push all the way from her clitoral hood down to her asshole, Gwen finally reaches down and takes hold.

Gwen - Hold on, hold on - there you are, push in now. Push. That’s right. Oh, ow - slower, slower, please stop -
Lane - Sorry, sorry, is that okay?
Gwen - That’s alright. You can go a bit deeper, just be slow.

Gwen’s clenching her teeth, tensing up against the foreign object intruding into her and flinching when it pushes in deeper. Lane’s concentrating so hard on figuring out how to move in Gwen’s he’s barely aware of the vagina clenching against his cock. Lane’s penis is used to the relaxed hands-on sensation of masturbation, and it responds to the intense, stressful situation by starting to go soft. Lane keeps carefully thrusting, but both of them can feel his cock shrinking inside Gwen.

Gwen - Are you okay? Am I doing something wrong?
Lane - Sorry, I’m losing it. Hang on a second.

Lane pulls out out of Gwen and crouches over his wang anxiously.

Lane - I’m sorry, I’m turned on, it’s just feels weird.
Gwen - Where’s the condom?
Lane - It’s… it’s come off.
Gwen - Where is it? It was on when you went into me. Is it on the bed?
Lane - It’s not on the bed. I think it must have come off when I was in you.
Gwen - Shit. Can you see it? Is it hanging out?
Lane - I can’t see it. Um, do you want me to reach in and get it?
Gwen - I’ll do it, it’s okay. Maybe - can you not look while I do this? Give me just a minute. Can you grab another condom?

That was the original text of the scene. This is the edited version:

Gwen - Are you all right?
Lane - Yeah, I’m good, it’s… I just need a second…

Alright, partial success. Now, something porn has not taught Lane is where exactly it goes. And while Lane’s struggling, Gwen’s lying back feeling awkward, not wanting to take the lead but after feeling his dick pushing everywhere but where it needs to go, Gwen finally reaches down and takes hold.

Lane – Aaaahhhh. It’s alright, I can go again.

Two changes were made from the original: 1. The description of Lane’s penis entering Gwen is much shorter and less explicit. 2. Instead of losing a condom during intercourse, Lane prematurely ejaculates.

Let me be clear - I’m not debating the director’s choice in making those changes, and I don’t dispute that they were necessary, at least for this production. The director’s explanation was that the language used in those lines is quite distinct from the other voices in the script. Fair enough, but I can’t help the feeling that future versions of that scene will look more like the original than the edit.

My reasoning is something along these lines: sex is incredibly complex. Getting it on with someone else is a physically, mentally and emotionally challenging activity, and the consequences of sex bleed out to almost every other part of our lives. (It’s also heaps of fun.) I strongly feel that the public discourse around sex should be far more intelligent, informed and yes, explicit. If you’re a curious young person (or curious any person) who wants to learn about sex, you need to sift through a mountain of disinformation intended to promote certain political/religious agendas, and another mountain of unpleasant, misogynistic portrayals of sex provided by exploitative commercial pornography. Even if you knew which sources were bullshit and could easily ignore them, accessing informed and intelligent opinions about sex is needle in haystick-like.

(As an important aside, I can’t talk about informed and intelligent opinions about sex without mentioning Scarleteen, the sex education website which has provided me with inspiration, solid facts and a really mature outlook on a whole range of sex, youth and related issues.)

Go visit Scarleteen. Seriously.

I’m not a sex educator, nor am I claiming to have any particular informed insight into topics around sex, but I can talk from my own experience (direct experience, and the knowledge I’ve picked up like we all pick up through living in the world); and when I do, I want to speak as plainly and clearly as I can.

Of course the scene quoted above is awkward and cringe-worthy, which was completely my intention in writing it. A lot of the comedy in Underage House Party Play is derived from the characters’ embarrassment at their situation. In the original text, the action moves away from Gwen and Lane’s condom predicament for several minutes, then concludes with the following lines:

Just after 5am. For the last few minutes, Gwen Malkin has been lying under the cover of Mott’s bed with one hand groping in her vajay. There’s something undefinably creepy about having a little plastic sock floating freely inside you. Gwen was happy to slide it into her vagina when it was attached to Lane’s penis, but now Lane’s gone it’s like there’s an alien object loose in her guts. When at last the tips of her fingers brush latex, Gwen stops for a second. She takes her time, carefully grips it between her fingers and draws it out. Long, long sigh of relief. Then the distant sound of glass shattering.

I think that this scene is awkward, cringeworthy - and yet hopefully at the same time, funny. I know that this kind of material is offensive to a certain demographic, and that’s not something I’m pleased about - I’m not setting out to offend - but as long as people are offended by the mere mention of penetrative sex, I’m afraid offensive is unavoidable. What I don’t want to do is be insensitive or insulting in my portrayal of these  situations, either by being crass and stupid for easy laughs, or by speaking on behalf of people whose experiences I have no insight into without proper consultation.

For example: for me to write a scene from the perspective of a girl trying to extricate a condom from her vagina is fraught, because I’ve never had that happen to me. I might completely misrepresent the experience, or I might say something which people who’ve had that experience find offensive. The solution (I think) is not to avoid writing from those other perspectives, but to research and consult with relevant people before writing. Also: to be ready at any time to listen if someone whose perspective I’m purporting to write from is upset or offended by my depiction of their experiences, willing to cop to any errors in judgment and to make amends where possible.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to apologise and make changes whenever anyone dislikes or is appalled by the content or language in my playscripts. If a man tells me that a particular line of dialogue from a female character is offensive to women, I will smile politely and completely ignore them. If a woman tells me the same thing, I will acknowledge their more in-depth knowledge of what offends women and talk it out with them.

are you a lady? what do you reckon?

In this instance: I am here and now laying this out for your thoughts and opinions. A large part of the sex scene in Underage House Party Play is from the perspective of teenage girls, and before I do any more editing I would be grateful for your input if you are or ever have been a teenage girl. I have the following questions:

1. Have you ever lost a condom during intercourse? If so, what was that like for you?
2. Did the sex scene seem realistic? Did it resonate with experiences you’ve had personally, or was it completely alien?
3. Do you find the language in the scene offensive? Why/why not?

Email me at blind_dragonfly at uymail dot com and I will be one thousand times grateful. Much love!

Declan Greene and Ash Flanders are Sisters Grimm. image by Claryssa Humenyj-Jameson.

Declan Greene is one half of faggot theatre duo Sisters Grimm and an accomplished writer in Melbourne’s trash theatre scene. I met Declan in 2009 at the World Interplay Festival in Cairns, where we shared a room in renowned backpacker’s hostel GILLIGANS. I managed to scam a copy of Declan’s blistering epic POMPEII LA, reviewed elsewhere on this site.

This year, Sisters Grimm will headline the performance showcase at the Crack Theatre Festival in Newcastle with their new show The Rimming Club (so new it won’t get written until 24 hours before the performance). They have also been hard at work creating the action-packed claymation saga Gingo, featuring adorable orange blob Gingo and his friend the purple blob. And on top of this, Arena Theatre and the Malthouse Theatre Company recently produced Declan’s script Moth.

Gingo the orange blob and his mother, the larger orange blob in an apron.

Other reviewers (such as Alison Croggan, whose back catalogue of reviews provides a good overview of Declan’s CV if yr interested) are better qualified than me to comment on the Malthouse/Arena production, because they saw it and I didn’t. I just want to talk about the script, which is fucking great. Moth’s plot is nothing out of the ordinary - teenage outcasts Sebastian and Claryssa find comfort in their friendship while Sebastian deals with mental health issues - but you can more or less forget the plot and just get washed away on the dazzling dialogue. I have no idea how teenagers actually talk, but every bone in my body is telling me Declan’s captured it.

CLARYSSA: Can you do me a favour and not talk to anyone tonight.”
SEBASTIAN: “Oh yeah. Cos emos are so cool.”
CLARYSSA: “They’re not emos. They’re Wiccans, fuckhead.”
SEBASTIAN: “‘‘Hey everyone! Lets get high and pretend to be witches.”
CLARYSSA: “I am a witch, fuckhead.”
SEBASTIAN: “‘Lets listen to Marilyn Manson and touch each other’s boobies!’”
CLARYSSA: “You know what? Fuck you. You’re banned from the coven.”
SEBASTIAN: “You don’t have that power.”

teenagers should how Declan wants them to talk.

In the last third of the play, as both characters begin to unravel, Declan’s language shifts into a kind of weird lyricism. Sebastian’s moth-inspired visions  J.G. Ballard at his most apocalyptic, mediated through the scorched noise assaults of Burned Mind-era Wolf Eyes. I’m not going to quote any specific lines because I don’t want them to lose their impact out of context. Instead, let me quote a different highlight: the exchange between Claryssa and her art teacher.

SEBASTIAN: “Blood. And wasn’t the assignment, Claryssa − wasn’t the actual assignment to
draw someone else in the class?”
CLARYSSA: “No-one in this class deserves to be drawn by me!”
SEBASTIAN: “Well maybe you’d like to draw the inside of Ms. Muir’s office!”
CLARYSSA: “MAYBE YOU’D LIKE TO DRAW THE INSIDE OF MY ASS.”

THAT’S FUCKING RIGHT. So anyway, I read Moth at 2.30am and when I fell asleep, I dreamed that Declan met me on a deserted field one morning before dawn, and showed me where to stand so that the sun when it rose would pass through me without illuminating me.

I’ve never seen Hadley in any other pose with any other expression.

The other extraordinary script of the week was Hadley’s MISERY AT PUMPER HOUSE, which is even more extraordinary seeing as it’s not a script, it’s a collection of notes and ideas about a potential future script. Set in the stately manor of the Pumper family, MISERY follows what happens when Monsieur Pumper’s boss, Mr Smash, comes over for dinner.

Almost, except instead of being that script, MISERY is five paragraphs of narrative, character exposition and staging notes, hammered out in a bizarre mess that is somehow still both evocative and theatrical. Here’s the opening three sentences:

Opening, Dippy is working on her latest experiment, attempting to use science to reanimate her recently murdered cat, Josef Stalin. Her father bursts in from a rain storm, she hides it beneath a dinner plate lid on the table. Poto is in a state because his boss, Mr Smash, is coming over for dinner, and he has to impress him for a raise.

Is that not theatre?

Mr Smash is coming over for dinner.

So part of me thinks that these paragraphs represent a set of instructions/stimuli that an ensemble could translate into a stellar live performance. Another part of me thinks that the paragraphs are perfect and they should just be read, as is. No actor is going to be able to improve on / make sense of the beguiling poetry at the heart of lines like:

Sedentary floats in, fresh from a session with her psychic advisor, Mr Glass, who has instructed her that soon the alien armada will be ready to be birthed in her flesh pod and fly back to their home planet. Poto hopes that Suds has been practicing his violin. VEEYOLARN.

Anyway, midway through outlining his plans for the Pumper House script, Hadley decides that MISERY is merely one episode of a series of four chilling gripping tales of terror. The audience might come to all four, or just attend one or two out of the selection. Alongside MISERY AT PUMPER HOUSE, the others are:

The Creature of Dick Hell Park - Paranormal investigators Loach and Thistlethwaite solve the mysterious goings on in Dick Hell Park without even leaving the office.

Young Lovers - young lovers separated by some sort of evil Spanish dictator hatch a plan to escape him, by faking their own deaths. they hide their bodies, their love, for a thousand years, where they will be reunited?

Swine, Swine, Swine - a famous young dental surgeon commits his elderly mother to a horrible, run down mental asylum as he must work all the time to look after her.

I want this duo on the case of the Creature of Dick Hell Park

Such scenarios are, to my way of thinking, elegant signposts that point you towards excitement without holding your hand the entire way. The whole MISERY AT PUMPER HOUSE project has the feeling of capturing the writer’s mental state at the moment of invention. This is Hadley’s creativity, freeze-dried and available for $0.71/packet, just above the soy sauce on aisle 8. Stock up while you can.*

*what am I even talking about