Ladies Day

Alana Valentine

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781925359633
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Drama

It's Ladies Day at the Broome races and the divinely beautiful Mike is the toast of the track. But amongst the froth and festivity, a brutal act of violence reminds us that life is not just all swishy hemlines, debonair gents and fascinators galore.Alana Valentine is one of Australia's best playwrights. Known for her incredibly successful verbatim works, she takes her interviews and research with individuals and communities, and mixes them with a healthy dose of drama. The result is powerful, thought-provoking theatre in which the voices of her protagonists ring absolutely true.Alana spent months interviewing the gay community of Broome to create a play that asks questions about tolerance, isolation, love, hope and the right to have your story told.

SCENE ONE

ALL: [sung] The queers in Broome are quite ill-groomed,

The gays in Broome are fat,

They’ve left the sceney city life

To wear a wide-brimmed hat.

The queers in Broome are coupled up,

They renovate and work,

You might get propositioned by

The hotel front desk clerk.

LIAM and MIKE might hold up their phones, connected via FaceTime.

LIAM: Come.

MIKE: Nah.

LIAM: Why not?

MIKE: Because I’m not in the space to do rural butch drag.

LIAM: It’s not compulsory.

MIKE: When is it not?

LIAM: Race day.

MIKE: Please. All those Spode-ugly girls in mass-made frocks.

LIAM: It’s fun.

MIKE: All those straight-acting closet types gagging on even saying the word ‘cock’.

LIAM: It’s not what you think it is.

MIKE: Standing around a denuded dust bowl brushing off clumps of dirt thrown into the air by scrawny horses and hirsute, potato-shaped poofters.

LIAM: That’d be Melbourne, darling. Up here we do glamour, sincerity and friendliness.

MIKE: Chances.

LIAM: Take it.

MIKE: No.

LIAM: Yes.

MIKE: No!

LIAM: I’m booking you on a flight.

MIKE: I won’t go via Perth.

LIAM: Direct.

MIKE: Club lounge full of mining industry queens cruising for a quickie.

LIAM: How horrible.

MIKE: Business class full of cowboys in prostate-strangling tight pants.

LIAM: And all of them drooling over you.

MIKE: And all of them dazzled by the words ‘fresh meat’ blinking in neon on my forehead.

LIAM: And what’s so wrong with that?

MIKE: I’m off the market, Li. I’m sworn off men, meat and methamphetamine.

Pause.

LIAM: You’re right. Don’t come.

MIKE: What?

LIAM: Since when did you turn into a lesbian?

MIKE: Some of my best friends are lesbians, Liam.

LIAM: Lesbians don’t have best friends, Mike, they have co-dependent refusers of pleasure. They have compliant earnest restricters of fun. Some of your best friends are lesbians, Mike, and you think Broome is dull?

MIKE: They’re very broad generalisations, Liam.

LIAM: Just another word for perceptive, my love.

MIKE: When I left John it was my lesbian friends who put me back together.

LIAM: Sure, but they’ve put you back together as some feral bush pig eco dyke with a sudden love of musky body odour.

MIKE: You’re terrible, Laverne.

LIAM: Come.

MIKE: I’ve got nothing to wear to Ladies Day.

LIAM: We’ll find you something, Madame Ovary.

MIKE: Something with a swishy hemline.

LIAM: Done.

SCENE TWO

LORENA: The hardest thing I have ever done, sexually, is when someone has asked me to masturbate for them. Because it’s just so private. I mean, they ask so that they can see what to do, how they can please me. And I’ve done it, it’s the hardest thing, because I know I’m going to benefit in the end. But of all the things I’ve done, and I’ve done plenty, that’s the time I’ve felt most inhibited. Yeah. I mean getting sex is easy, really. I’ve gone onto Grindr for some of these guys and I’ve got them laid in an hour. This friend of mine he was hopeless, dull responses. You know. And I got on there and was just witty and funny and confident and voilà. He was having sex within half an hour. And I told him, ‘Just don’t say anything’. Because he’s just not funny, you know. And funny, witty, sweet, that’s what people...