Playwright Holland Brooks saw the debut of Unnatural her first full length work at The Blue Room this week.
Unnatural brings together a team of queer artists from across Australia to present Brook’s play that is described as one that rips open the Australian Gothic to paint a visual story of queer reckoning, redemption, and reclamation.
Brooks is a graduate of the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts Performance Making program and for this work she’s teamed up with some notable collaborators.
The play is directed by Andrew Sutherland, a well known writer, actor and director and performed by Gabriel Critti-Schnaars, Jess Nyanda Moyle, Jacinta Larcombe and Marli Jupiter.
Unnatural is described as as a transformative experience of queerness by travelling through six journeys of metamorphosis. The promotional blurb for the play is one that got our attention, a series of intriguing descriptions.
“A child discovers a two-headed goat.
“A mother gives birth to a squid.
“A teenager inherits the spirit of an ancient lake creature.
“A preteen sells their disabled sibling’s heartbeat to fetishists on the dark web.
“A famous writer becomes a snail.
“A priest-in-training resurrects Jesus. He’s real, He’s really here, and He’s really, really hot.
“And we haven’t even touched the weird stuff yet.”
Ahead of the opening night we asked Brooks asked about the stream of magical realism statements, and they shared why they was attracted to the genre.
“I’ve been working specifically in queer theatre for a very long time, because I think that there are so many queer stories to tell, but I found myself frustrated by traditional storytelling and cis-hetero narrative structure, it’s just inadequate for describing the queer experience.
“So I turned to actualising or abstracting the way I feel about the world into things that are beyond reality, because I feel in many cases they feel more true.”
Brooks shared that the play began its life as part of the WA Youth Theatre Company’s 24 Hour Play Generator project, where writers are given just a few hours to come up with a premise and short scene.
“This is a show I’ve been working on since mid 2022, it actually began as part of WAYTCO’s 24 Hour Play Generator Project. It’s a phenomenal project that I hope is really around for a long time.
“When I participated James Berlyn was the Artistic Director and he offered one line that had to be anywhere in the text, and that line was ‘I still have hope that things can change.’ and that line is still in the text many years later.”
After creating the first part of the work Brooks was commissioned to extend the play into a longer piece and local writer Chris Isaacs served as a mentor. Then in 2023 the Antipodes Theatre Company in Melbourne commissioned Brooks to develop it into a full length play.
Brooks says the process of letting go of the work and letting the director and actors put their spin on their words is the most exciting part of the creative process.
“I know the work so intricately, it’s had such a long and very developed life, so when I handed it over to Andrew Sutherland I was like ‘Look, this is my first fully developed play, I’m really excited to see if everything is working, and in order to do that I need someone else to completely take it away.”
Brooks said the intimate Blue Room theatre is the perfect space for Unnatural to be stage.
“The purpose of the work is to ask audiences to question their relationship to the world around them ,and the people around them, the kind of intimate relationships both on a very large scale within the world, but also on a very intimate scale personally within themselves.”
Brooks said the audience being very close to the performers was a challenging and exciting element of the work.
Unnatural is on at The Blue Room until 23rd November. Tickets are available now.
