I’m up in Sydney for the Festival, and have just seen Cheek by Jowl’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, of which more later. Back in Melbourne, the annual GLBTI arts festival, Midsumma, remains in full swing. Check out the program at their website. Here are reviews of shows I’ve seen so far.

Negative Energy Inc. by Ash Flanders, Theatreworks, Until Feb 5.

Ash Flanders

Let’s face it: an optimist is just a narcissist of below average intelligence. The effect of positive thinking has always been to make people forget about the world’s problems and focus on themselves, and it almost always favours the powerful. It’s easy to think the universe is in an optimal state if your vapid self-help book has spent hundreds of weeks on top of New York’s bestseller lists, but less easy to understand the narcotized masses that put it there.

Negative Energy Inc. offers an unstable weave of cabaret, personal anecdote and stand-up comedy that will warm the dark hearts of life’s curmudgeons. Ash Flanders isn’t really interested in showing how that half-full glass is half-empty. He wants us to know it isn’t a glass.

Flanders has form when it comes to drinking deeply from the toilet bowl of trash culture. He’s one half of the talented queer theatre outfit Sisters Grimm, and has honed his subversive and decidedly outré hilarity in shows from Fat Camp to Mommie Dearest.

His latest feels a little unshaped, and at its weakest the material is animated by the fizzled firework of pure whimsy, rather than the blowtorch of cultural satire. Yet Flanders has a sharp wit, and a gift for improvisation he has no hesitation in using to run down and reverse over the show’s stillborn babies.

Expect hair-raising stories from Christian youth camp, a mordant ditty on the trials of Adriana Xenides (complete with electric blue ukulele), and sardonic quips on everything from the self-help industry to the homophobic culture embraced by casting agents in this country.

The best material isn’t simply funny, it uses satire to diagnose who benefits from unthinking optimism – whether it’s the rich getting richer, the institutionalisation of male privilege in religion, or the preferment of heterosexual actors on stage and screen. I only wish he achieved that level of sophistication more: Flanders possesses a zany flair for ridicule, but it really takes flight when guided by his pessimistic intelligence, as well as his eccentricities.

 ***

Mother / Son, by Jeffrey Solomon, Theatreworks, 14 Acland St, St Kilda. Until Jan 21.

It isn’t only gay people who have trouble coming out. Their parents have their own closet to escape. Some find it difficult to relinquish hopes for grandchildren, to address fears of discrimination and of disease, to overcome irrational feelings that their child’s homosexuality is somehow their fault, or to tell their friends, who may be homophobic in ways they don’t quite realise.     

All of these common experiences are canvased with wit, warmth and unflinching honesty in Jeffrey Solomon’s one-man show.

Set in early 90s America, it tells the story of Brad and his overbearing Jewish mother. They’ve always had a close relationship, but it has taken Brad years to come to terms with his sexuality. When he finally tells his mother, he has to come to terms with her coming to terms with it.  

Solomon skilfully switches between mother and son, through a tale as big on hilarity as it is on sentiment. Both characters are observed with a compassionate eye to their frailties. The mother transforms from a sheltered middle-class ‘liberal’ too ashamed to invite her son’s boyfriend to a family wedding, to a placard-waving gay activist (which has its own embarrassments for Brad).

Solomon is extremely acute on how intimate relationships can veer into self-parody, and the unquenchable stream of neurotic Jewish humour, staying just the right side of caricature, is utterly disarming. It helps leaven some tragic events.

There are very occasional lapses in technique that smudge character delineation, but the main problem with the piece as art is one downside of its strengths. Mother/SON does stray into a distinctly American mawkishness, and some later episodes lay it on with a trowel, so the narrative becomes as tediously over-determined as any melodrama. The American Queer as Folk leapt to mind.

I daresay this is a cultural difference. Mother/SON remains vital theatre. It might overplay its hand as art, but there’s no doubting it is life writ large, buoyed by a core of emotional truth that gays (and their parents) will immediately recognise.

*** 

Love In A Cubicle, By Steven Dawson, OutCast Theatre, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Until Feb 11.

Love in a Cubicle may be queer theatre, but it takes on many of the unedifying qualities that afflict our main stage fare. The core story of two blokes who meet as schoolboys, have an affair that ends badly, and are reunited in a sex club ten years later, has the potential to be a gay rom-com that goes beyond the conventions of the form to illuminate all kinds of messy human truths about love and gay culture. Yet it’s sabotaged at almost every point by stupidity, sentiment and smut; the pantomime impulse in Australian theatre that so heavily anticipates its own failure it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The action is framed by a hammy Greek chorus (David Parsons) indulging in shambolic commentary on how rubbish the play is (not funny), not to mention huffing poppers, like Divine in John Waters’ infamous Pink Flamingos (funny). The shameless trashbaggery continues in Lee Threadgold’s many cameos, ranging from an alcoholic Irish nun to a gloriously bitchy middle-aged roué.

There’s nothing wrong with playing to the pit, but playwright Steven Dawson stoops to wilful facetiousness so often that the play’s earnest moments come across as fearfully melodramatic and schmaltzy.

Both Angus Brown (Peter) and Kevin Dee (Joel) make fine use of physical humour, and are at their best in the affectionate portrayal of youthful discovery. There’s not much either can do with the industrial-strength cliché machine Dawson brings to their characters’ reunion.

One lost opportunity is Peter’s screed against the vitiating emphasis on sex in gay culture, which he feels blights his chances at companionship. Brown overacts to buggery, and the jaded romantic’s argument isn’t expressed with the rhetorical force the character ought to command.

If you’re after a spot of male nudity, a stream of quips and gags with a modest strike rate, and a love story that makes the mawkishness of Hollywood look sober, then you’ll have a reasonable time. I’m not so easily pleased.