Blessed Union is probably Australia's first lesbian divorce play — let alone its first lesbian divorce comedy — but playwright Maeve Marsden would rather not think about that.
"I have tried at every turn to resist it," she says, giving two reasons.
First, while she can't find records of an earlier homegrown play on the topic, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist; queer performance often sits outside the mainstream, evading databases and lists and records.
The second reason is more complex.
"The whole point of the play is what poster-child syndrome does to a family, and what the burden of representation does to the way we live our lives and our relationships," Marsden explains.
The burden of representation that might come with, for example, having your debut play not only be described as the first Australian lesbian divorce comedy, but also open on one of Sydney's main stages as part of the WorldPride festival.
If Marsden feels the pressure, she's not showing it — partly because, as she says when we talk in early February, "I'm still busy trying to finish my play and parent my toddler."
Blessed Union, premiering at Belvoir this month, follows a family falling apart over nine months as parents Ruth and Judith separate.
It's a play about "lesbians, divorce, food, family, togetherness," Marsden says.
It queers the age-old genre of the 'family comedy', while also asking some pointed questions that Marsden hopes, more than five years after the same-sex marriage postal survey, we're now ready to explore.
"What happens when queer people engage with conservative institutions: Do we change those institutions, or do they change us? What does change look like? Can you chip away at something from the inside, or do you need to blow it up?"
And: Can we laugh about it?
Queer stories, queer perspectives
Marsden is a theatre maker and writer who has been creating work for more than 15 years in the independent sector.
She has built a career via shows that up-end expectations and stereotypes with shrewd comic timing: first, Lady Sings It Better, a popular cabaret act where women sang songs originally performed by men, in the process commenting on the sexism that slipped into their lyrics; then Mother's Ruin, an international festival hit that explored the history of stereotypes about women.
She has been a performer, a writer, a producer, and a director (her inventive production of Lizzie, a rock musical about accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden, scored her a Best Direction of a Musical nomination at the 2022 Sydney Theatre Awards).
However, Marsden might best be known for her Queerstories project: a popular storytelling event, award-winning podcast and anthology, of which she is producer and host.
Queerstories began in Sydney as a live show, and has now travelled around the country. At each event, a line-up of diverse LGBTQ+ speakers share stories about their lives and loves that reach well beyond tales of coming out, creating a rich view of the queer experience — from the mundane to the extraordinary.
"I think that the best queer storytelling butts sadness and humour up against each other," Marsden says.
"It's laughing at our trauma, it's jokes at the wrong moment, it's going on a first date and immediately talking about heartbreak."
Queerstories keeps Marsden immersed in queer voices, and it helped inform her approach to Blessed Union as a piece of queer writing that is bolstered by queer experience, language, and performance styles.
A lesbian divorce comedy
The idea for Blessed Union presented itself to Marsden fully formed, as a play about "lesbians getting divorced, meeting them over a series of Sunday lunches across a year, as their family falls apart".
The story draws from her own life, growing up as a child of lesbian mothers who subsequently divorced — an experience she says was "foundational for me".
"We're meant to have fought our whole lives to be together and to be accepted as a unit, accepted as a family. To destabilise that image, after having been somewhat of a poster child for queer families, wasn't just an emotional loss of your parents' love or togetherness, it was a political loss of an identity," she explains.
"That is interesting to me — and it's something that a lot of people raised in straight families might not understand."
She started writing the play in the wake of the same-sex marriage postal survey of 2017.
"We'd just had the plebiscite, so I had just watched my community go absolutely bananas for an institution I had absolutely no time for," she recalls.
"I wasn't emotionally or politically invested in marriage but suddenly, everyone was super, super into it. I went to the announcement at Prince Alfred Park, and everyone was crying, and I was kind of dry-eyed."
This experience coincided with a reckoning in her professional life.
"I felt like my approach to work in the arts, which was to do often multiple roles on one production, wasn't serving me and wasn't serving the work I was making," she explains.
"I had an inkling that if I did one of my jobs at a time, I might be better at them."
In August 2018, she decided to create some accountability for herself: "I wrote a tweet which said, 'I'm going to write a play, one I don't perform in.' I think I said, it will be a lesbian divorce farce, and I've put it on Twitter after some wine, so now I have to do it."
In late 2019, she applied for Belvoir's Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, which was for the first time open to multiple recipients, with the prospect of each 'winner' being part of a playwrights' lab.
"I don't know if I would have applied if it had been for just one writer; I think I would have thought I wasn't going to get it," Marsden admits.
"But when it was a group, I thought, this not only appeals to me because I'm an extroverted, collaborative person, but also they might take an almost-middle-aged cabaret maker who wants to write a play."
Laughing at ourselves
Blessed Union is a four-hander ensemble comedy, but the catalyst is Delilah (played by Emma Diaz), a 19-year-old law student and aspiring politician who is therefore particularly invested in the relationship between her parents Ruth (Danielle Cormack) and Judith (Maude Davey) and their activism as a lesbian couple.
Ruth is a union organiser and Judith is a primary school teacher, and they live with their antagonistic, cheeky teenage son, Asher (Jasper Lee-Lindsay).
"[The play explores] the impact on the kids, especially the daughter; the [impact on the] 'brand' of the family, for want of a better word; and what it means to uphold your family on a political pedestal as well as an emotional one," says Marsden.
That last subject can be a fraught one.
"I have had other queer spawn [children of queer parents] read it. And one of them was like, 'Oh, you're showing us in too bad a light,'" Marsden says.
"And I was like, 'Well, plays need conflict', and great representation is being able to laugh at ourselves and critique ourselves. That's freedom.
"[But also] this isn't a play about the most marginalised even within the queer community; these women, they're white middle-class ladies — they'll be fucking fine."
From theatre maker to writer, and back again
During the COVID lockdowns, Marsden watched as all her playwrights' lab retreats and events were cancelled (at the same time that her other work dried up).
As a first-time playwright used to working collaboratively, she found the process of writing solo difficult.
"My partner has ended up being quite involved in the writing process, because I need another brain – I can't operate solo; I have moments of brilliance alone, but that's not where my passion lies," Marsden says.
Entering the rehearsal room in January, in collaboration with director Hannah Goodwin, she felt in her element once again.
"Someone said to me, 'You're not meant to enjoy it in the rehearsal room, writers don't enjoy this part.' And I was like, 'Well, I'm not a writer, I'm a theatre maker – it's just that this play needed me to be a writer.'"
She has shared resources with her fellow theatre makers on Blessed Union, when necessary; for example, a foundational article on dyke camp, the strain of camp performance informed by the lesbian experience, became something of a style guide for the production.
And she's been able to speak to the lived experience that informed the play.
"I talked to them about how the condition of being a lesbian in the world is being kind of objectified as a woman, but also being abject as a woman, because you're not for the male gaze. And also being aware, especially if you read as queer, of being watched," she says.
"And when you're raised by lesbians, you do have this — at least in my era — sense of being an object of curiosity. And how you respond to that is an individual question — but how I've responded to that is being quite a performative person."
Big questions and little gifts of representation
Like their creator, the characters of Blessed Union are "always performing for each other".
"They're finding the pose or the language that will entertain each other the most," Marsden explains.
"That sensibility is through the work and these characters do speak in a style that is based somewhat on the way I communicate — but it's heightened."
It's also part of an inherently queer "playfulness with language and identity and politic" that Marsden wanted to capture in her play; one of what she describes as "little gifts" for her audience – ensuring that queer people see something recognisable of themselves on stage (in the design, in movement and physicality between lesbian characters), even as she pokes at political victories.
"That's when I'm glad that I've got a director [Hannah Goodwin] who holds it into reality, because it needs to feel human, and it needs to feel emotional," Marsden says.
"I hope that people can engage with the ideas and the story – that they're able to emotionally invest in the people, don't feel like they're being lectured, and are also able to go away thinking well, 'Is marriage the best foundation for our children? What have we signed up for?'"
Blessed Union is at Belvoir St Theatre, Surry Hills, until March 11.
