Freefall Productions. 15 Sep 2022
Extraordinary how one can miss the memo; Wendy Harmer is a gifted playwright as well as stellar Australian stand up comedy talent.
Harmer’s script What is The Matter With Mary Jane? translating actor Sancia Robinson’s experience surviving anorexia nervosa into a one act play, is redolent with Harmer’s familiar cadences and comic pace. Yet there’s an incredible amount of room for Stefanie Rossi to work the material in a structural flow suiting her particular stage strengths and brave the challenge of a text demanding a highly attuned capacity to find dramatic nuance in dark comic moments.
Tackling a disease of the mind that finds expression as a fatal eating disorder in a comprehendible manner, without seeming maudlin, didactic or off putting is a hard ask. As much as it is not to offer it up too softly.
Harmer pushes Rossi straight into the audience’s face. She must address them directly, as herself. Herself playing out the memories, fantasies, excuses and suffering that is anorexia.
This melding of stand-up narrative monologue, peppered with sharp, biting, wit-laden imagery balanced against deep fear, insecurity, and submission to an inner demon, is spell binding. The text is peppered with lines raising many snorting shots of laughter amongst the audience.
Director Tony Knight and Lighting Designer Stephen Dean keep it simple, considering the level of deep human complexity they’re tasked with bringing to life.
Knight’s direction paces Rossi’s performance with shifts in and out of anorexia life experience and moments through the 16 to 35 year old’s life.
It allows counterbalance of comic observation, genuinely deep emotional distress and self delusion to build over the hour to the sonic climax of the production.
Rossi has a great capacity for unflinching, revelatory emotion. Comic work and timing is executed with deceptively playful abandon and sardonic finesse.
Dean’s lighting is uncomplicated but centres on creating a crisp black and white palette in which light spots rise and fall illuminating set pieces on a white tape marked stage with four narrow white bordered mirrors, a white table, toilet and black chair.
David O’Brien
When: 14 to 24 Sep
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
