The presence of gay people has, historically, been rather controversial. Subjected to gassing, stoning, electrocution, prison, “re-education”, bashings, corrective druggings, religion, slurs, civil deprivation, that virus, ignorance, hatred, apathy, neglect, fists, guns, knives, ropes, teeth, and boots, their persecution has been universally outlined by the final annihilating ill, silence.
Silence is the sound a dead body makes. The sonic pitch of a million memories feeling their last electric pulse. Total nothing. Carmen Maria Machado in her In the Dream House writes of the absence of queerness in the historical record: “Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” Audre Lorde in her The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action rejects the iron-fist of quietude: “We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” John Boswell in his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe notes of the resistance to queering history: “Many readers, rather than being eager for the information to be thus gathered and relayed, will be inclined to resist it.”
The Queen’s City of the South was initially inspired by the podcast The Greatest Menace, a queer true-crime show on which Salvestro was interviewed. A detailing of Cooma Prison’s time as the world’s only ‘gay prison’, The Greatest Menace cuts through the thin skin of mainstream Australian history, blasting its clogged arteries with the warm transfusion of acknowledgment. Queer history’s subterranean life, maintained by society’s sewer mutants and denied into non-existence, sees this shit time in Australia’s past passed on like a baton to The Queen’s City of the South. Fittingly, the show is held at the defunct Darlinghurst police station, where Qtopia has reclaimed and refurbished the space.
Written by Mark Salvestro and set in present-day Cooma, the play opens with a man screaming in pain as electricity shreds into him, a picture of two men together accompanying this torture a la A Clockwork Orange. His cry fades and he disappears. Before we have time to question it we are deposited before Ryan (Mark Salvestro), the host of the regional town’s public radio show Ryan’s Roundup. Heading straight into an interview between Ryan and the at-once captivating Maggie (Kath Gordon), small-town life looms large; Maggie’s gunning for a position as president of Cooma’s historical society as Ryan lobs pre-written softballs to her on-air. It’s immediately charming. Laughter comes easy here, rolling against the stage like a wave machine. Maggie unveils her election promise to bring back the Festival of the Alps, of which her mother once was crowned queen and sat upon a float for admirers to watch and wave. Ryan says something cheeky. It’s all warm. After the interview, as Ryan is getting ready for the next guest while chatting with Maggie, interloper Lucas (played wonderfully by Jack Calver) drops in like a glitch, splitting the play in two.
He’s looking for information about his grandfather, tracing him to Cooma sometime in the 1950s, where he seemed to have been in love with another man. However, the records run dry, with no knowledge beyond his name. Ryan puts out the call on the radio to any locals who might be able to share something.
After a few know-nothings, a steel voice cuts in and mentions a place where “his kind” used to be lockedup and treated for their perversions: the old Cooma Prison. The line goes dead. The play goes on.
The Queen’s City of the South handles this oscillation like a masterpiece pendulum, swinging from end to end with precision. In one scene a blue flash lights the growl of a policeman condemning homosexuality as Australia’s chief concern. Then; Maggie shyly hosts a local fundraiser, timidly tapping a cold mic. Then; a boozy kiss in the studio late at night. Then; Ryan boils over in upwelling rage with Maggie matching. A mention must be given to sound designer Madeleine Picard, who covers this breadth and raises the play from an already solid base.
Between the play’s pendulum swings is the pain of confusion, of Ryan realising that the town he loves has been hiding something so awful for so long. Salvestro’s abiding respect for truth in its fairest form paints the play with the vital authenticity of reality. Similarly, costumes, picked out by Elle Fitzgerald, evoke the characters in their fullness, with each character’s clothing fitting their personality to a tee. The lighting, designed by Luna Ng, fulfilled the space in a way that gave meaning to every decision and followed the twisting moods of the play like a spotlight.
The open question of uncovering a suppressed history is, “What do we do now?” Evergreen in Australia’s consciousness as a country built on genocide, slavery, and violence, this question is asked again and again. The Queen’s City of the South doesn’t indulge in giving a clear-cut solution, and it benefits from it. The Snowy Hydro Scheme is repeatedly referenced throughout the play, and, like the dams that Cooma helped build, Salvestro shows us how every individual is holding something back. So much of who we are is constituted by our pasts, and when some crack appears we all too often plug it up in desperation, fear, or pain. Each of the characters in this play reacts in different ways to their past lives. Ryan runs from his shattered Sydney dreams, Maggie clutches onto her hopes at being crowned queen at Cooma’s no-longer-running festival, and Lucas turns to the past with welcome abandon. As the pressure in the play builds, arguments split relationships apart like waterjets. Salvestro and Gordon play this expertly, making me feel like I had accidentally walked into something real. Director Ryan Whitworth-Jones has shaped a play that employs each actor and element to its best.
And there is no true aftermath. Like in real life, The Queen’s City of the South has no nice bow to string around itself. The characters are changed, certainly, and for the better, but their goals are not over. At first, I felt a bit deflated at how it ended, a thud instead of a bang. But looking back, it works. As a country we still don’t know how to face the shame that sits in our past; our national identity is defined by it. All that can be done is to broadcast reality, again, and again. Ryan’s position as a radiohost reminds me of what a speaker, quoted by Brian Bouldrey, once remarked at a fund-raising event for the San Francisco Public Library’s Gay and Lesbian Collection: “We write your textbooks, your laws, your history.” The Queen’s City of the South has become the superimposition, a new layer of truth over a hushed-up story of denial. I am glad it exists, not only for its significance but for the experience I had watching it. Silence is fragile, and this show is another drop to the deluge waiting to be unleashed, dammed up by an insecure nation’s shame.
Slowly, like rain, the banks will swell and that dam will rupture. It will be loud, the ceaseless roar of terraforming. After, surrounding the sodden debris, a silence will fill the air, different this time, one of contemplation. When we break that nothingness, may we know better how to answer the first question that will pass our lips: “What do we do now?”
The Queen’s City of the South is playing at Qtopia until October 19th.