Debauched with the wind: Griffin Independent & Sisters Grimm’s Summertime in the Garden of Eden

Imagine Gone With The Wind. Now add hanging baskets of flowers, biblical allusions to Eden, a dash of gender-blind casting. Throw caution to the wind, stir, and perform. Only then might you come close to Sisters Grimm’s Summertime in the Garden of Eden, currently playing at Griffin Theatre. It’s gloriously colourful, a riot of stereotypes and clichés, a relentless assault on the Southern (as opposed to the Western), and it’s an absolute treat.

Written by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene (the Sisters Grimm), Summertime in the Garden of Eden is a melodrama in the fullest sense of the genre, gloriously played to the hilt but never to excess. Performed in their home-cultivated brand of “queer DIY drag-theatre” (as perfected in their previous shows), the Sisters Grimm are a pair of cult theatre-makers with imaginations that would make Lewis Carroll blush. A bit like a pantomime and a gender-blind costume drama, it is a ridiculous amount of fun, even if beneath its ludicrously homemade aesthetic lies the uncomfortable an unavoidable reality of the gender, race, sexuality, and cultural-political issues of the Southern. Skewing and perhaps ridiculing them whilst simultaneously drawing attention to them makes for unsettling viewing, but the relish and delight with which the cast play out the story is enough to make you forget the sting of the play’s subject.

Still orbiting: Griffin Independent & ARTHUR’s Return to Earth

Two years ago, after Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch wove its magic at Belvoir, I set about trying to find as many of her plays as I could find, either in performance or in script form. When Griffin announced their 2013 season a year ago, I was very keen to see Katz’s Return to Earth, in its Sydney premiere, as I had heard mixed reviews of its premiere season in 2011 at the Melbourne Theatre Company. Presented here by ARTHUR as part of the Griffin Independent season, Return to Earth is very much a Lally Katz play, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or otherwise.

Return to Earth is about Alice, a thirty-something year old woman who returns to her family home in the sleepy coastal town of Tathra in NSW, and the impact her return has on her family, her friends, and the people she meets. In typical Katz fashion, the surreal and whimsical smashes right up against the poignant and heartfelt, yet it feels as though there is an elephant in the subtext of the play which no one is addressing.