NAKED By Diana Nguyen

CHARACTERS

Diana Ngyuen (as herself)

Audience (as themselves)

Tom Taylor (as floating voice)

SETTING

Upstairs at the Lithuanian Club, a mostly full, tiny box of a room.

ACT 1: Scene 1

Audience a little frigid to start.

Weather also frigid. A Wednesday night.

This is the second show I’ve seen tonight. I chose this one because it started 15 minutes earlier than the one I intended to see.

Diana Nguyen has just had a nap.

Cue entrance of Diana Nguyen to pop song. She dances a little, stops abruptly, signals to cut the music, looks a little groggy (see note about nap), gets into it.

NGUYEN: (Insert a bit more than an hour of stand-up here. Nguyen is grinning throughout most of the show. Dialogue may vary depending on the performance but should include:

• Funny impersonations of Nguyen’s mum
• Clever observations of the differences between Anglo Australians and Vietnamese – Australians say “sorry, sorry, sorry”, Vietnamese make pho
• Rough topics (grin included) like how Pauline Hanson’s last stint in public life made an 11 year old Vietnamese Australian girl in Springvale ashamed to be Asian, to speak Vietnamese and start following footy
• Commentary on being cast in film and on TV as an Asian in Australia – always the prostitute
• Great airport scene with said good mum impersonation, referencing other good jokes from earlier)

Also includes:

• An average first joke about Q&A, some jokes that land with a wobble
• Some glitchy transitions between sections.

Audience participation (young couple in the front row will obviously be the first to get mowed down). Nguyen offers them an improvised song in exchange.

More comedy, balloons, music, dancing and thrusting.

NGUYEN: I’m going to go put some clothes on.

End show. 

30 September 2016

Dear Victoria,

I saw your show, Les Femmes Sauvages de Dieu, last night at The Meat Market in North Melbourne. Afterwards, I went to talk about it with the security guard but he wanted to talk about Hillary and Donald. I tried then to tell my housemate but his eyes were snoozing. I’ll tell you instead.

Your performance was stunning. The three women you embodied were each captivating. The way you played with sound, with breathing, with movement, with presence, with masks, with gasps, with groaning was masterful. Without dialogue, you created worlds around these women that were lonely and painful and beautiful. In fact, the only parts of the show that felt less interesting were the words in the narrations

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Between the two of us, I am wary of titles in French. I was also wary as there were only five of us in the audience, with a dozen or so seats spare. I wonder what it was like coming out to see such a small audience? It didn’t seem to bother you. As buses and trucks occasionally roared past the venue, drawing us out of your performance, you drew us back in.

With your voice and with your instruments, you made sounds I have never heard before. The space was expansive and there was only one of you, but you filled it.

I know that my brother wouldn’t have liked the show. “I didn’t get it”, he would’ve said. I don’t know if I did either. I am not sure that I was able to link the narration to the pieces. I don’t think that matters much. I was carried through the stories that each of the women was telling. He also would’ve said that it was slow and asked me why you carried that glowing ball through each of the pieces. I am not sure except that there was continuum through each of the scenes and the piece moved at exactly the pace it needed to.

You deserve many full houses.

Warm Regards,

Tom Taylor

I want to tell you how fantastic Down Down Lucifer is. I want to talk about how the script was clearly written by someone who knows what they’re doing and how the acting draws you in then carries you from scene to scene without you ever fully remembering you’re watching a play. I want to convince you that this might just be the best solo I’ve ever seen.

So I will.

Down Down Lucifer is an examination of God’s ethics and a takedown of the Bible’s most famous stories, teachings, and contradictions. A solo show written and performed by Philippe Klaus with direction by Josh Brennan, it centres around the fallen angel Lucifer as he struggles with God and attempts to steal your soul.

On a technical level this play is near flawless. The sound production and lighting blend seamlessly into the performance, manipulating mood through colour, lighting and music. At times they’re transformative, providing easy shifts from scene to scene or place to place, and at others they bring vibrance and draw focus to key moments of the performance. No effect is wasted and every action is perfectly timed to complement Klaus’ acting, and the technical aspects of this play aren’t even its best assets.

For the most part the play is a satirical comedy that retells stories like those of Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ from Lucifer’s perspective. With pointed questions and cheeky comments, Lucifer toys with the other characters, making poignant arguments and delving into themes of faith, religion and morality.

As the plot unfolds, Lucifer’s fight against God for popularity transforms into a search for identity beyond that of the devil. The comedy is pierced by heart-wrenching pathos, and through it all the viewers are compelled to question their own beliefs and criticisms of Christianity’s and Catholicism’s favourite villain.

Lucifer himself is charming and witty. He guides the story with sarcasm, clever commentary and brutal honesty. He’s arrogant, but also humble and willing to admit when he’s wrong. Through his exploration of the paradoxes of God and his own human complexity, Lucifer is able to draw empathy and build a sense of deep frustration that resonates beyond the walls of the theatre.

Klaus and Brennan nailed Down Down Lucifer. It’s everything it needs to be: well-rounded, hilarious, thoughtful, and at times, confronting. And for that Lucifer can have my soul.

Donald Trump wins. That’s the future World War T invites us to imagine in the sketch comedy satire based around the 2016 US presidential election. A collection of short sketches and quiz show style segments, it’s designed to make fun of Trump and everything he stands for.

Written and Directed by Blair Moro, it claims to be reminiscent of Monty Python, Louis CK, George Carlin, and David Frost.

It isn’t.

The play itself felt disjointed and sloppy. Mismatched scenes were dropped in haphazardly, with no central storyline to maintain the flow. On a number of occasions the actors broke focus to play themselves and talk about the show, a choice that seemed unnecessary and added no value to its broader themes or ideas. These problems would have been better managed if each segment stood on its own merit, but most felt amateurish and unpolished.

The blocking was messy, with little spatial awareness on the actors’ parts and a general lack of consideration towards movement. The performances felt erratic and improvised, which made them distracting to watch and took away from the content of each scene. Ultimately, this gave the sense that the actors hadn’t prepared for their performance space and were trying to cram the show onto the stage instead of working with the available room.

It did have its redeeming moments. One standout was a scene in which Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton were supposed to battle it out in a presidential debate, however Trump’s character took the opportunity to bombard the audience with some of his most famous and controversial quotes. The problem was these gems were few and far between and at least one of them was pulled straight from a Buzzfeed article.

World War T wanted to break down the US presidential election, to delve into Trump and his Vice President pick, to speculate a worst-case scenario for a Trump presidency, and it wanted to pull all this off using satire and comedy. It might have achieved this if the dialogue was snappier and the scenes had a clearer direction; it might have been stronger if the characters didn’t bleed into one another and more attention was paid to voice, posture, and gesture; and it might have felt more cohesive if the scenes had been purposeful and connected. Unfortunately World War T did not feel like a finished product. It felt like the creators simply didn’t have enough time to figure out what they were trying to do or how to do it.

Full disclosure: I’m a dead-set feminist. Give me women or give me nothing. Radical, liberal, personal, political – don’t care, I’ll take it all, wave upon wave.

I’m never sure if it’s in spite of my feminism or because of it that art and media which claims to represent the experience of womanhood tends to grate. Sex and the City is laughable, Girls is insulting, and in a very similar vein Low Level Panic, the debut performance of Someone Else Theatre, was hard for me to endure.

Set entirely in a domestic bathroom, three housemates move in and out of the space, sharing with each other and the audience their insecurities, fantasies and feelings. The play seemingly aims for realism and relatability, depicting candid conversations and moments of personal introspection.

Sounds great, but it didn’t stir me. It was just okay. The story was rushed, and didn’t allow us time to connect with the characters. Despite some great one-liners and moments of banter, much of the text made the women seem vapid and uncaring. The presentation felt overdone as the actors unnecessarily faked stilted British accents, reducing the authenticity of their interactions. A highlight was the staging of the performance, with seating on two sides of a spacious pink bathroom stripped down to its studs, in which one character spends the first 15 minutes of the play sloshing naked in the bath (yes, with water and all).

Written by Clare McIntyre in the 1980s, perhaps the script was bold for its time but 30 years later it falls flat, neither strong nor subtle. Hearing women dismissively read aloud from a tacky porno mag is no longer edgy; honest talk about women’s bodies is easy to find if you know where to look; we’ve learned better language to express frustrations with sexism. Perhaps for an audience member less resolved than myself, less familiar with art and writing by and about women, the play would have been refreshing and new. The script has good bones; more courageous and creative direction might have allowed these to shine and make a contemporary statement.

There was one element of the play which, sadly, rang timeless and true: the experience of a woman harassed on the street by two men, her thought process as she tries to understand the incident, and her anxiety, discomfort and distress in its wake. This is what the play aims to address – the way societal pressure and gaze affects women’s relationships with our bodies and our selves, and the low level panic that ensues. It’s an important topic that should be tackled by art. Do it well and many (not all, but many) women will relate. That’s the kicker though – you’ve got to do it well.

Improv Against Humanity is improv for horrible people. It’s exactly what it sounds like only better.

If you’re not familiar, Cards Against Humanity is a 2011 game involving two sets of cards: one white, one black. White cards contain random words and phrases on them while black cards contain sentences and scenarios with blank spaces. These are notoriously awful, generally taboo, and always anti-human decency. The goal is to use the white cards to fill in the blanks and create the most hilarious or outrageous sentence possible. The player with the best sentence wins the round.

When Improv Against Humanity starts the audience are given a set of white cards while the actors read out a sentence or scenario. Audience members can then volunteer a card if they think it’s good and the card that gets the best reaction becomes the basis of the performance. There are four prompts and four plotlines, each with their own set of idiosyncrasies. What ensues is a chaotic mix of hilarity, mortification, and the guilt of knowing you really shouldn’t be laughing at this.

The result is brilliant. The actors are quick witted and clever, bouncing off each other’s ideas in easy synchronisation. At times the show flows so smoothly it would be easy to assume it’s scripted. The characterisation is quite good, considering the lack of preparation, and while many of the performers have default styles, these are deep enough and diverse enough to carry the show without becoming overdone or boring.

The use of flashbacks is fantastic, weaving often depressing and utterly horrendous background stories into present-day trauma and character conflict. Small details are pulled out, picked up, and transformed into running jokes that jump between plots as easily as if they were planned. And the audience is there for every step, watching as the show blooms into something equal parts hilarious and abominable.

As with any improv there are moments where the story lulls, usually in character arguments where it’s difficult to create new and engaging content without proper preparation. But to the actors’ credit these are few, far between, and only as long as it takes to spark up their next idea.

On opening night we saw an office worker willing to pay anything for genuine human connection, Jeff the Wiggle get a little too excited over hot potatoes, Caribbean Jesus struggling with his disciples, and the entire universe open up to the tune of Old Man River and the sound of a single tear hitting the floor. But every night is different and there’s no telling what will happen with each performance. So for that, this is definitely something worth seeing at least once.

Mama Alto is finishing her Extravaganza. She is part way through one of her last songs when she stops. She is standing among the audience in the Ballroom at the Lithuanian Club and she is asking us how we want the song to end. She can do a “big, small, big” or a “small, big, small”, and as she looks around the audience yells for one or the other. “Hold on,” she says, “you should know by now that I do not deal in binaries.”

Mama Alto is a force. She moves around as if she were gliding, she moves between notes as if she were gliding and she moves from song to speaking and back again as if she were (you get it). She is cheeky with her audience and with her accompanist and music director Miss Chief, on the piano.

I do not know my jazz but I recognise a number of the songs and names – Nat King Cole, Summertime, Billie Holiday. Mama leans into each song with a story, locating these songs and locating her way to them. She talks about performing in Cuba, former Fringe shows and grande divas of the stage. Her work, her music and her identity are political, but also beautiful, generous, gentle. A man, drunk, yells out in one of her songs. She finds him after the song, takes his hand and tries to make a pact – if he is quiet during the show, they can chat after in the bar. “Maybe,” he says. She glides back to the stage. Later, after he is removed, she says that she feels bad that he should miss out. “Bring him back,” she says, “I’ll just have to work harder.”

“This show is not scripted,” she promises us, and true, every now and then slight cracks appear. She builds up to launch into a new tune only for Miss Chief to lean over to clarify which song she meant by her segue. But just as soon as the crack has appeared, Mama Alto is there with crack filler. She and we revel in these moments where she makes cracks of cracks.

After the penultimate song – the crowd went for “big, small, big” – she ends on a flat number. It is the only song for the night that is anything but holy. But it is too late, the audience is charmed. Mama Alto has knocked us out and so a stray punch to end matters little.

When you meet someone for the first time, you should tell them interesting facts about yourself. You speak a little Japanese. You’re an excellent problem solver. You taught yourself to play recorder. You have three hearts and your blood is purple. Wait, what?

Downstairs at the Butterfly Club, I’m at the birthday party of a lovely, lonely, socially awkward woman I’ve never met. Complete with presents, cake and balloons, this is Awesome Ocean Party, Giema Contini’s one-woman show. I’d interviewed Contini earlier in the year, and it’s great to see the piece come to life in all its imaginative and silly glory. Contini uses song, storytelling and physical theatre to tell us a very accessible tale about overcoming grief and loneliness.

The love child of a beautiful woman and an ancient octopus (don’t think too hard about it), the girl is abandoned before birth by her father and orphaned when her mother dies of a broken heart. Washed up on an island, she grows into a woman with only the moon as friend and teacher. She was never given a name, which made it difficult when she met new people. She asks us to name her and I suggest Persephone – strange and sweet, like her. She introduces us to her favourite things, tells us the fairy-tale of her life, and takes us along on her rollercoaster of emotions. Have you ever heard a mournful rendition of her favourite song, Under the Sea? It’s quite moving.

There’s no suggestion of a fourth wall. Contini’s engagement with the audience is immediate and relaxing. On the evening I attend we’re an intimate group of just five, and she locks eyes with each of us, asking our names, offering compliments (that’s what you should do when you meet new people), lightly splashing us with water so we too can have a swim.

Another interesting fact – did you know she can taste everything she touches? She tastes me with her hand and finds me to be delicious. I’m quite flattered. Contini is a talented performer creating within a unique artistic style.

It’s a sweet show. Heart-warming, humorous and light, it meets its promise, and for someone who’s been to six fairly intense performances in as many nights it’s nice to sink into the depths with something comfortable and take a break from reality. It’s like enjoying a Disney movie, and feels a little misdirected at an audience of adults. We’re told at the end of the performance that there’s more birthday parties happening in coming nights…and I’m not sure whether it’s Persephone or Contini uttering the line, “I need more friends.”

“I have been the plaything of men for too long. Now, I will decide my own destiny.”

This quote speaks to the resolution achieved at the end of Echoes, a play by Henry Naylor. It’s the story of two women divided by culture and 175 years, but drawn together in a sisterhood of startling parallels. Tillie is a Victorian woman who, fearing spinsterhood, takes free passage East to marry a bachelor officer of the Raj, finding herself with him in Afghanistan, earnest about taking Christian values to the people. Centuries later Samira is a young Muslim woman pushed to jihad by the racism of modern-day Britain, flown to Syria to wed a fighter for the Islamic caliphate, passionate about the fight against non-believers.

The two women, portrayed by Rachel Smyth and Filipa Bragança respectively, find themselves alone in foreign and dangerous lands, unprepared for the disturbing realities of colonialism, war and terror. Two women dissatisfied by their homeland, sold a story of adventure, constrained by time and religion, at once too smart and too naïve, too strong and too innocent. Told in animated alternating monologue, the stories are parallel but allowed the flexibility to develop at their own pace. I found myself more deeply moved by Samira’s narrative – whether because of its political relevance, its contemporary language punctuated by humour and pop culture references, or because of the truly outstanding performance offered by Bragança, who inhabited the complex character of Samira in a way that attracted intense empathy. The play ends as the women find each other across time to deliver a stirring shared monologue, accompanied by the striking image of a woman removing her hijab.

Echoes has been doing the rounds and scooping up awards on the international Fringe circuit for the past year, and it’s clear why. In many ways it’s a simple play – with no distractions allowed from staging, costuming or music, the play relies solely on Naylor’s germane and witty writing and the two actors’ enthralling delivery. The complexity of Echoes comes through its exploration of the way sexism and racism constrain choice and lead people to extreme acts. As Tillie and Samira are disrespected and subject to violence by their husbands and their societies, the play becomes a painfully relevant commentary on the status of women across time and culture, of the “inequity of laws binding for women and too loose for men, twisted to men’s benefit.” But it’s okay, right? That’s not our culture? In a country where one in three women experience family violence in their lifetime, we shouldn’t be so sure.

Echoes is not so much a call to arms as a call to acquaint yourself with the reality of what’s going on in the world, to shake off ignorance and innocence. The play finds exhilarating climax as the two women claw back their agency and find ways to fight their abusers and define their own future. Better to die fighting than endure a life that’s not your own.

We, the congregants, enter and are asked to inspect the relics of the church.

This church is a space at Footscray Community Arts Centre, not perfect, a little new and boxy, will do.

Hymn sheets at the ready, the service is underway.

A trio of cloaked, older women lead us in humming, then hymning.

The lyrics have been rewritten, we have lived, we are still living, they say.

The service starts slow, a little jolty.

The trio twist egg timers, and for the rest of the show these will tick, tick, tick, tick and then time’s up. As each timer announces its end, we chant, “Yea verily yea”. If I’d seen a single film predating 1990, I might know it to be a reference to The Court Jester.

We are led to the relics again; the trio and then we share stories of objects. Though it was never in doubt,  the fourth wall has been reduced to rubble.

The congregants are re-arranged in the pews and the trio are warming up now.

We the congregants are handed blueberries, veils and enough symbolism to know that this is a celebration of secular ageing. Cheeky and sincere. 

We the congregants don moustaches of youth and our three don beards of wisdom.

There are readings from Caryl Churchill and Judith Wright. All hail Caryl who just keeps making magic at 78.

We are asked to dance, we dance, we are asked to offer our favourite words. Full disclosure, I offer “fabulous”. They are.

The trio call on us to make noise before the silence comes and envelops us all.

The trio are dead, and covered in rose petals.

They are reborn in full colour, cocoons that have burst open adorned with headpieces made of women’s wellness mags.

The service is over in an hour, cue ‘Can you feel it’ by the The Jackson 5. We dance, the spirit of living is alive here. Some congregants leave their moustaches on as they huddle outside the theatre.