What kind of people would Will Truman and Grace Adler of Will & Grace fame be if they lived in present-day Sydney? The Culture, a new Australian play from Sydney-based theatre company Powersuit Productions, might have one answer.
Katie (played by Laura Jackson, who also pens this work) is the kind of white feminist who asks “What would Jules [as in, Gillard] do?”. She works in marketing and wears a vulva costume to an office Halloween party. She and her gay best friend, Will (Mina Asfour), make a podcast together, live together, and lament their singledom together.
After a debut season at the Producers Club in New York, this production takes to the stage at the Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville before touring around Australia. We lay our scene in a well-furnished Sydney apartment, with a blue velveteen couch, plants and side tables galore. Every surface is laden with a stash of Katie’s favourite chocolates, Cherry Ripes, that sparkle red under the stage lights. It’s pretty lavish for a pair of twenty-something housemates, complete with a podcasting studio and wardrobes filled with bright white sneakers and pink workwear. They have a shelf full of books, but Gillard’s Not Now, Not Ever, takes pride of place on the coffee table – because these two are socially aware, of course.
It’s a rather impressive set for an indie production, however this painstaking detail is a little under-utilised. During the concise 75-minute runtime, only a few scenes actually take place in the podcast studio or in the lounge room, with other ‘club’ or exterior scenes taking place in the empty space between the sections of their apartment. In one particularly awkward scene, Will and Katie attend one of her work parties together and meet ‘The Mountain’, or Mr Kale Brown, and have one-sided conversations with him (as we are asked to imagine him) across the breakfast bar.
When they get home, Will understandably asks, “Who would name their son after lettuce?” With jokes like this, it’s unclear whether The Culture is making fun of Will and Katie as two-dimensional versions of the kinds of passionate young lefties who decide to make a podcast called Don’t Even Get Me Started, or whether it’s asking us to play along with the in-jokes. Asfour does his best with what he’s given, but his character doesn’t have any discernible purpose other than being Katie’s diversity-hire best friend.
Pink power suits, leafy green puns, and surface-level quips aside, the play pulls in the threads of some more serious societal issues. After initially dismissing Kale, Katie begins a relationship with him that eventually turns sour. Somewhere along the way we also find out that Katie has a history of disordered eating. And in his one moment of getting real, Will pours his heart out about that time he was assaulted in high school for outing himself to the ‘jock’ type character that he’d been building an online relationship with.
Homophobic incidents, eating disorders and domestic violence are, of course, issues worthy of discussion and inclusion in our art. However the danger with including all of them at once in a 75-minute play is that you don’t have much time to delve into the complex reasons why they might come about, and so they become oversimplified caricatures that can instead reinforce harmful stereotypes of ‘strong’ men, ‘sassy’ gays, and ‘woke’ white women.
The Culture has all the right ingredients to offer a funny and relevant take on the zeitgeist, but it doesn’t dig deep enough to drive home its various threads. Hopefully, with a sharper focus, this promising young theatre company with noble intentions can cook up something a little meatier next time.
The Culture is playing at Flight Path Theatre, Marrickville, until May 20. You can snap up tickets for $30-$35 over here.
