A white actor pissing into a bottle and calling it art? No thanks, Michael Mohammed Ahmad isn't interested. Nor does he need tickets "to watch some white guy literally improvising some nonsense and sweating on us".
The Arab-Australian author of award-winning novels The Tribe and The Lebs grew up in Lakemba in Sydney's west ("There were so many Lebs, we called it Leb-kemba") and knows that he doesn't have to fling "sweat on my audience to tell a compelling story".
"I can literally get onstage and talk for an hour about my family."
Ahmad, 35, says that growing up he was disappointed by the local theatre scene, because it didn't reflect the multicultural Australia he knew.
"It was not uncommon to see a 100 per cent white-produced show. You could go into the theatre or a publishing house and there was not a single CALD [Culturally and Linguistically Diverse] or Indigenous person in sight. It's 100 per cent white-run."
Despite the fact that the residents of the Greater Western Sydney region speak over 100 different languages and have arrived from more than 170 countries, it has been rare to see their narratives on stage, says Ahmad.
"Even the diversity stories can be cringe-worthy sometimes," he says.
Ahmad's latest project flips the script on that scenario: Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls, premiering as part of Sydney Festival, features a person of colour in every single role — from writers to director to actors, lighting assistant and make-up artist.
A mix of theatre and film, the show interweaves four narrative strands, written by young writers Omar Sakr, Shirley Le, Winnie Dunn and Stephen Pham.
Their intensely personal stories unfold in various parts of Western Sydney: a revealing bus ride that leads to the scene of a fight; a car park that's the backdrop for a Tinder date gone wrong; and a Vietnamese bakery, where the namesake pork rolls are sold during a very late shift.
Ahmad is the editor for the script, and the show is directed by S. Shakthidharan, whose award-winning Belvoir production Counting and Cracking sold out its season at Sydney Festival in 2019.
In his program note for the show, Ahmad describes Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls as the realisation of an eight-year mission "to unapologetically reflect the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of contemporary Australia".
A different kind of theatre
Shirley Le says that growing up, she "always thought that theatre was this 'high-brow' type of art".
She describes an experience of theatre that consisted of compulsory school excursions to Shakespeare productions.
"[It] didn't feel accessible to a young person of colour who is from south-western Sydney," she tells ABC.
For this reason, she was keen to be part of Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls.
"I had to think to myself, 'What does it mean for me to be entering this space and to be entering this medium as someone who has felt excluded from it?'" she explains.
Le has spent the last three years developing her part of the script, which is inspired by her experiences during a period when she had dropped out of her law degree, and explores her struggle to uphold the Asian-Australian "model minority" stereotype.
Le spent six months acting like she was going to class, rather than tell her parents the truth; in reality, she was aimlessly wandering around Western Sydney. (When her parents found out, they stopped talking to her for a while, Le says.)
For Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls she transposed her experiences into a monologue in which a young woman (played by Aileen Huynh) takes psychedelic mushrooms given to her by "a guy with 90s boy band hair and no future" and has a meltdown afterwards.
100 per cent POC
Le and fellow writers Winnie Dunn and Stephen Pham are members of Sweatshop, a Western Sydney "literacy movement" founded by Ahmad in 2013 "to [empower] people of colour through reading, writing and critical thinking".
Sweatshop is described by Ahmad as being "run exclusively by people of colour for people of colour", and in 2015, he started to approach other arts organisations about making works in this model.
The need for it was there. In 2017, research collated by Melbourne performer and playwright Kim Ho showed that just four of the 95 productions staged by Australia's ten largest theatre companies that year were written and directed by people of colour. In 2019, Diversity Arts Australia released a report finding that only 9 per cent of the leaders of our major cultural institutions were CALD.
Performing Lines and Playwriting Australia supported Ahmad with an early development grant, and Sydney Festival and Bankstown-based company Utp came on board after reading a first draft.
While the creative team has shifted since the show's inception (writers Peter Polites and Maryam Azam were involved at one stage), Le, Dunn and Pham have been involved from the get-go.
The final addition to the team was Omar Sakr, who in December became the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for his book of poetry The Lost Arabs.
Although their stories contrast and clash, there are connections between Pham and Sakr's parts (as queer writers writing about gay men) and Dunn and Le's monologues (about women struggling with social expectations).
And all four stories take place the day Donald Trump is elected to The White House, in November 2016.
The presidential candidate famously called Mexicans "rapists", bragged about sexual assault and embraced Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke — yet ended up a winner.
The cultural impact of this bigotry courses through Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls like a fast-acting poison.
"The sexism and racism perpetrated by Trump, that is not an imported problem to Australia," says Le.
Her monologue grapples with how immigrants can absorb this prejudice as a way to fit in, repeating racist beliefs to try to appear 'mainstream' and assimilated.
Making the private public
As the title suggests, sexual encounters and drug consumption feature in the show; there's also violence.
Ahmad remembers an early draft of Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls where all the characters were just witnesses. "You can't all be observers," he told the writers. "It has to be you."
The result is an aggressively direct work. Characters trade racist insults, calling each other Bin Laden or Pocahontas. Several characters end up in a violent brawl; it's excused as a misguided flirting attempt and an unhappy customer reaction to the pork rolls served, but to the gay character enduring the punches, it's unmistakable violence.
"People are going to be blown away by how in-your-face it is. Especially in contrast to all the theatre we usually get in Australia, which is pretty tame," says Ahmad.
Shakthidharan says he "recoiled" when he first read the script.
"That turning from public to private was confronting for me."
And then there are the pork rolls.
It may seem odd for this particular food to play a headline role in a work where two Muslim men (Ahmad and Sakr) hold key roles. But the banh mi acts as a symbol for Western Sydney — and a vegan (and halal) version of the Vietnamese baguette is served to guests who attend the show.
In a similar vein, Shakthidharan offered Sri Lankan string hoppers and curries to guests who saw his previous work, Counting and Cracking.
The director initially signed on to direct Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls in early 2020, just before Australia went into lockdown. His initial thoughts for the staging had to adapt to the new parameters for live theatre — which is why the final result is a filmed performance that unfolds on four different screens that people can view in a socially distanced way.
But the multichannel nature of the work also allows the monologues to cross over and connect. It physically mimics the head-spinning disorientation as Le's character trips out on drugs, while it captures (all too well) the indignity of finding a stranger's sperm on your hand — or worse, being attracted to someone described as "Ed Sheeran on steroids".
The spectre of Trump
Just as Shakthidharan was finishing the video edit for Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls, Trump supporters stormed The White House, leading to five deaths and the second impeachment of the President.
It's fitting that this work, inspired by his election, debuted on Wednesday — Trump's last day in office.
For Shakthidharan, Trump's legacy is especially disturbing because it was foreshadowed by the Sri Lankan civil war (which was the focus of his play Counting and Cracking).
Despite the tough subject-matter and experiences that inspired Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls, there's a lot to celebrate, too.
Ahmad said it was a "special moment" when he saw the cast and crew of the production assembled recently — five years after he first pitched his idea.
"It was so diverse, it was like a bag of Skittles."
The impact of Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls is not lost on Le.
"Art can be created in communities for communities and quite often that can be the most powerful art," she says.
Sex, Drugs and Pork Rolls runs until January 23 at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta as part of Sydney Festival.
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2021-01-21 19:35:00Z
CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAxLTIyL3NleC1kcnVncy1hbmQtcG9yay1yb2xscy11dHAtc3dlYXRzaG9wLXN5ZG5leS1mZXN0aXZhbC8xMzA3NzY2MtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMzA3NzY2Mg
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