The Theatre Underdog Fights Back

Revolution They Wrote: Concordia’s Short Works Feminist Theatre Festival Premiered at Café Cléopatra on Saturday Night

Photo by Katherine Chou
Photo by Katherine Chou
Photo by Katherine Chou

Less than a week after International Women’s Day, the three-day festival addresses topics of feminism, homophobia, transphobia, drug use, sex work and love.

Emily Schon, a student in the activism and theater program at Concordia University, initiated Revolution They Wrote with Agunik Mamikonyan, president of Volunteers In Action, in September 2014 to replace its predecessor, The Vagina Monologues.

The objective with this new festival is to open up a conversation about the type of things seen on stage and more specifically the stories that aren’t usually seen on stages. Another goal is to open up opportunities for young people in the feminist and queer community, but also opportunities for young people to discover feminism.

Fifty per cent of the profits will go to the CSU club Queer Concordia while other half to the authors.

The festival displays three short plays that explore the intersections of feminism. Selected through a contest, the original scripts are written by Concordia students and acted out by students from the theatre department.

In Eat/Fast by Michelle Soicher, a young girl named Yael, played by Caite Clark, comes out to her grandmother, Judy Kenigsberg, on the day of Yom Kippur. With the generation gap unhelpful in communication, Yael tries to make her grandmother understand that her life is not a choice.

The Scar Tissue by Ché Baines addresses subjects such as drug addiction, homelessness, transphobia and sex work and stars Ella Storey, Ashia Fredeen, Paolo Wilken, Sebastian James and Leah Careless.

The Hands Of Our Neighbours features a married couple that are the last survivors after a bomb destroyed their suburban neighbourhood. The husband, played by Gabriel Schultz, is having an affair with his neighbour George, while the wife, played by Cleopatra Boudreau, is asexual and is in constant competition with George’s wife who is a perfect housewife of the 1950s.

“These conversations aren’t ones that we are encouraged to have and these aren’t conversations that we are giving time for,” said Schon, director of the plays. “To have these conversations and make them meaningful you have to give them space and time.”

“We need venues to be able to educate ourselves on LGBT,” said Schon. Montreal doesn’t have a queer-only theater company, although theater companies in the city do produce work by LGBTQ writers or will engage in these conversations like Black Theater Workshop.

“Less than 50 percent of the scripts are by women and no statistics exist on how many transgender writers we have,” said Schon, expressing that women in the arts are underrepresented.

“We searched for the voices and stories that spoke the unavoidable truth that we are here and that we matter,” she said.