Words by Fabrice Wilmann

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche is a laugh-riot affair, an engaging production that will leave you with a hankering for quiche and some good lesbian company to share it with.

It’s 1956 and the Cold War is at its peak, but even the threat of nuclear annihilation won’t stop the charming widows of the Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein from getting together and celebrating their annual Quiche Breakfast.

They settle in to devour their feast, but everything is thrown into disarray when an attack by the Red Scare decimates the outside world, leaving the women at the quiche meeting as the only remaining survivors. They’ve done the math: they won’t be able to leave for another four years, enough time apparently for the nuclear gases to become non-lethal.

Do they have enough quiche to feed all 66 members?

How will they repopulate the American landscape without a man, or at least some of his best swimmers?

As they ponder on their very future, and the future of the America they know and love, the secrets they have been harbouring for so long are finally revealed. “I’m a lesbian” they take turns screaming to (what remains of) the world. The Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein is a proud lesbian sisterhood, and it only took a nuclear attack for it to be revealed.

The sisters are finally free to express their true selves, but is it all too late? The grand matriarch of the society reveals that she is pregnant. Gasp! She has broken the golden rule: no meat, no men, all manners. How will the sisters recover from this scandalous revelation?

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche offers a night of enjoyable silliness – where the audience is left to question the importance of these women professing their lesbianhood, not to mention how such a large group of lesbians happened to end up together in the good old days of McCarthyism. The performance doesn’t seem to concern itself with matters of such earnestness; instead it chooses to engage with the audience and provide a sense of catharsis by having everyone scream at the top of their lungs: “I’m a lesbian.” Because nothing unites like a communal profession of lesbianism.