“but to sacrifice what you are (…) that is a fate worse than dying”
Making its premiere at the Sydney Fringe Festival, the debut theatrical work of writer/director Anastasia Dale, Joan Marie, is an exploration of sapphic relationships through folkloric fantasies and suburban realities. The two characters, affectionately named Joan and Marie, create their own story by finding themselves in tales as old as time — moulding a fantasy life that hangs on loop the wire in their final hours together.
Advertising itself as the ‘lesbian play’, Joan Marie marries western literary tales with Uzbek folk tales. Dale found herself inspired by the interplay of gender in Shakespearean plays, having the actors envelop these characters in a pastiche of time. This becomes the queer subtext of many of his plays, most notably Twelfth Night, serving as a playground for sapphic characters to explore themselves. Joan Marie’s story is both a fresh and modern reflection of queer relationships as we see and experience them now, as well as a vignette of the queer stories that have shaped the way we experience these relationships.
Feminist and queer authors, specifically Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Gertrude Stein influenced Dale’s writing, and emerge as references in the script. Dale also invites the audience to reflect upon the innate folly and queerness of historical figures with recurring reference to Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake”. Dale’s choice to depart from the western canon in her exploration of Uzbek folk tales integrates a sense of cultural perspective and spirituality to display an otherworldliness.
Across a mere 55 minutes, Joan (Ava Jenkin) and Marie (Evie Lane), invite us into their reverie. Through Shakespearean dialogue, discussion of high school girlfriends, and folk stories, we experience two lovers create a fantasy world. Maybe it is within the abstract that these two can fully live their queerness.
The two actors, Jenkin and Lane, come together to develop, what the audience felt was, a whole. Jenkin brought a strange sense of nonchalant lucidness to Joan — she has clear intention and understanding, and yet the audience feels at odds with how indifferent she seems. She is frustrating and detached, and yet so romantic and gentle. There is something almost holy about Jenkin’s gaze as Joan, like I could write endless stanzas of poetry and lines of prose about it and never run out of words. Her eyes reminded me of a girl I once knew, or maybe a girl I will come to know, or perhaps, if I am lucky enough, the girl I will come to be. Her character carries this sense of homeliness and care with her that is so seductive to the audience.
In many fictional accounts of sapphic relationships, it feels non-men are presented in extreme juxtaposition (masc / femme) or with extreme similarity. Here, Joan Marie developed personalities beyond trope and archetype. By focusing on that undiscussed interstices in between, I think that many queer non-men may be able to see themselves reflected in either character, or a combination of the two. Director Anastasia Dale says “while I feel this is a very personal play, the themes speak to a broader queer experience”. Dale reflects in the parts of the queer experience from which the characters are born saying “I see Joan and Marie, in a way, as two sides of my own psyche. For many queer people there is the pull of wanting mainstream acceptance, to make oneself more palatable, as is represented by Marie’s repression. There is also a pull in the other direction, to yell, be angry, be so yourself that you alienate some people and perhaps isolate yourself – as represented by Joan”.
It is remarkable in itself that Joan Marie was a Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) Fringe pick, along with Red, despite never debuting at SUDS. Dale has been loosely involved in SUDS prior to Joan Marie, performing in Alex Butler’s On Girls And God in the ‘Behind Closed Doors’ showcase in April of this year, but aside from this, she is a relatively fresh face to the uni theatre scene. SUDS stalwart Rose Cooke no doubt aided this with a smooth production process.
The Fringe stage is one that draws near to the play’s origins, Dale’s viewing of piss / CARNATION’s 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals at Edinburgh Fringe Festival heavily inspiring her writing of this offbeat story: “I saw how fringe can be a place for non-normative and experimental works”. It is significant within itself that this play is being held at QTopia Sydney, a museum and theatre venue opened in February this year located on the corner of Oxford Street, the city’s primary queer district. The museum’s initial intention, as stated by Professor David Cooper who funded the space’s creation, was to “highlight the medical, humanitarian, political and community response to HIV/AIDS in Sydney” (QTopia), however it has become a much broader celebration of queer culture, featuring exhibitions like ‘Dykes on Bikes’, ‘Dirty Words: First Nations Languages’, and now presenting the debut work of queer artists like Anastasia Dale, Joan Marie. Theatregoers are able to feel a real sense of connection to our past and the movements that have shaped where we are now, the museum existing on the site of an old police station, before diving into an art piece reflecting the intimacies of the queer experience.
The set design by Erin Murphy evoked a sense of childhood memory and simplicity, almost like a dollhouse – Joan and Marie’s domestic fantasy life. The wooden kitchenette with swirls painted as stove tops made it feel as if the characters were playing a children’s game of ‘mummies and daddies’, affectionately donning roles in a life they cannot live. It makes sense that the set has a life of its own, what with Murphy and Dale’s art school lineage, all aesthetic qualities add value to the show’s meaning. The sound design aided this utopian and fanciful feeling.
It felt the audience was almost held back from the nitty gritty emotional turmoil for the characters and instead greeted with fantasy. I felt there was perhaps more to see, deeper to dive, sitting on the precipice of something more raw and real. Though it may just be this feeling of precipice that gives Joan Marie its charm — their lives are at a crossroads, spending their final night together as lovers before Marie marries and fulfils the housewife role she’s always seen herself in. There is so much situational tension, and yet the lovers appear with little strife, simply living in this moment to love.
I do not wish to lie by saying I fully understood Joan Marie and Dale’s vision — but to me there is a kind of beauty in not knowing, in confusion and uncertainty. Not all art must be understood. Sometimes it may simply exist for beauty, or to be understood by specific people. That is what Joan Marie was to me, a work of beauty, an artistic non-linear creation.
Joan Marie opened 4 September and closes tonight 7 September to an almost sold-out run, at The Loading Dock, Qtopia Sydney. More information can be found here.
