MARIE: Now you be Carol and I’ll be Therese.
JOAN: No, no.
MARIE: Oh, can’t we? [beat] Then let’s be Vita and Virginia.
JOAN: Come on, no.
MARIE: Okay, you be Sappho, I’ll be one of Sappho’s muses.
JOAN: Let’s be Joan and Marie.
MARIE: Oh. Yeah, okay. When you get back, okay? After you get back.
JOAN stands to leave. The next four lines are in the tone of something said often between them.
JOAN: One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it.
MARIE: There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
JOAN: I die for speaking the language of the angels. Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.
MARIE: If the people have no bread, let them eat cake.
JOAN goes to leave, stops, turns to MARIE.
JOAN: I do believe I have been searching for you in castles and stages since the Middle Ages.
JOAN goes to leave once more. She is almost at the door when MARIE speaks.
MARIE: I understand I am blindfolded in the castle tower. I am being led downstairs, I can’t see, I can’t see, but it feels like it’s raining. It smells of the earth.
Joan Marie follows two lovers as they traverse the myriad worlds their love could exist within, as reality seeps slowly back in. Joan and Marie journey through the literary, the historical, the folkloric, and the absurd. The play explores the relationship between two women, yes, but also the worlds that surround them.
In writing this play, I was greatly influenced by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose work is queer in every sense of the word, queer readings of Shakespeare, and folk tales passed down through oral tradition. Joan Marie is a sort of collage, a work that twists and turns through vignettes, showing reality through fantasy and fantasy through reality. In my artistic and writing practice I constantly return to dreams, fantasies, and abstractions of meaning as ways to express the inexpressible.
I was also influenced by my Gender Studies classes, in particular after being introduced to the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Strangely, it was not Adrienne Rich or even the CompHet MasterDoc, but de Beauvoir’s The Woman in Love, that crystallised compulsory heterosexuality for me: a woman as a ‘thing’ in the world, existing for others, and the only way “to overcome her situation as inessential object [is] by radically assuming it… she wants to melt into him, forget herself in his arms.” I found resonance and enchantment with Butler’s words in Bodies That Matter, and found myself perceiving a glittering city of high-rise hegemonies and billboard enforcements, on the outskirts of which live the abject, the queer.
It’s been such an amazing process to work on Joan Marie with the cast and crew. Both cast members, Evie Lane and Ava Jenkin, have such impressive theatrical sensibilities. They uplift the work and breathe so much life into every line. Erin Murphy, one of my favourite painters, is designing a set with a painted backdrop and furniture made from canvases. The kitchen, with its orange wallpaper and floral accents, borrows from Carol and Holding the Man. We’ll have a Lynchian little sound design. There’s a rhythm and weirdness to the tone we’ve struck in rehearsals. The work is non-linear, odd, at times farcical. It’s a queer story told in a truly queer way.
Joan Marie is showing at the Loading Dock Theatre in Darlinghurst from 3-7 September. Concession tickets are $29. More information can be found on Instagram @joanmarietheplay
