Toronto hosts a fantastic festival of queer theatre with this weekend’s Gay Play Day! The two day affair at boasts an impressive array of queer talent at The Alumnae Theatre studio space in Toronto on September 27 & 28, 2013.
My fantastic Sex City colleague Dorianne Emmerton presents her work Obscuring Jude as part of the event. We chatted about her play and the festival.
What inspired Obscuring Jude?
It started a long, long time ago, back in university. Partially it was inspired by my own adverse reaction to the idea of pregnancy. Of course, when you’re a young woman people always say “You’ll change your mind, it’s a beautiful thing,” yadda yadda…but I was pretty sure (and remain so) that I never wanted to be pregnant. I’m also drawn to read a lot about the things that strike me as disgusting, so I came across this phenomenon of pseudocyesis—of people being so convinced that they are pregnant that they exhibit all the symptoms, even though they aren’t. And I started thinking about a character who’s experiencing that, but it’s not because she just really wants a child. And she knows she can’t be pregnant. So how and why would she think she has this baby? And that led me to religion, of course. Jude alternates between deconstructing Christian theology—the virgin birth and all that—and constructing an ideology that makes sense to her, that is useful for her to process the world.
It’s written in a series of chunks and I wrote the first couple of those back in the ancient days of textbooks and pub nights, but I’ve developed it a lot since then. It’s still very interesting to approach it now as a significantly older woman.
How did you get involved with Gay Play Day?
I saw the original call for submissions through the queer writing group I’m involved with, OUTwrites. We meet twice a month and I have less time to attend now that I’m parenting (I was never pregnant with my kid though—the aversion remains!) but the Facebook page and listserv are very active with calls for submissions, and also workshops and other things of interest to writers, particularly LGBTQ writers.
It was shortly before Pride that the Gay Play Day organizer, Darren Stewart-Jones, sent out the acceptances. I was excited but also a little concerned about how I was going to cast it. I have theatre training but I don’t consider myself much of an actor, and I don’t think it’s very wise to write and act and direct all yourself—you need an alternate perspective. I wanted to direct it, and I needed an actor who “got it”—who understood Jude’s tangential trains of thoughts, her very dark humour, the implications of all the things she never explicitly says. I was scheduled to do a reading at an event at Glad Day for Pride, a community meeting with performances on the topic of bisexuality. It was an amazing event, very empowering, and I don’t throw that word around a lot. One of the other performers of the night was this wildfire of a woman named Katie Sly. I approached her immediately after and asked for her contact information so I could make a proposal to her. I send her the script and happily she agreed to be my Jude. She’s been fantastic to work with.
What other plays are you looking forward to?
Two of the other solo shows that are in the matinee with Jude—Hossam and Joel by Lorenzo Pagnotta and Fairy Tale Confidential by Marcy Rogers. Katie knows Lorenzo and speaks highly of his work, and Marcy is a colleague I know from OUTwrites. We often help each other with our writing so I know how funny she is.
What other work can we look forward to from you in the future?
I have a short story about an internet troll that gets kind of cyber punky in the Friend.Follow.Text. Anthology that’s coming out in October. The launch is October 23rd at Playful Grounds in Toronto. I also have a short story in the premiere issue of Beer and Butter Tarts, a journal launching in December, and I have a personal essay in an anthology called A Family By Any Other Name: Exploring Queer Relationships coming out in April.
Obscuring Jude is in the 3 pm matinee of solo shows on September 28th at Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto. Tickets are just $10 and can be reserved in advance at gayplayday@gmail.com.
