WHY I READ THE PLAY I READ

SAM BROOKS on Jason Drowning

When reading the work of any queer playwright born before their time – or, if I’m being honest – my time, I can’t help but wonder the work that could have been. With limitation comes creativity, sure! It means a writer can dress their text up in metaphor and allegory like a drag queen getting ready for their 11pm slot at the club. It gives the generations that follow endless fodder to examine and reinterpret a text. Those limitations are also armour, though. Metaphor is plausible deniability, allegory is a command to ‘look over there!’ Armour protects you, but it also holds you down. It locks you into place. A writer’s tools become their anchor, and as a writer with the relative freedom to write anything, I can love the art while still pining for the artist and how they had to bend to tell the stories they wanted to tell. There is no denying the brilliance of Williams, of Albee, of Fornés, but both the little queer boy inside of me and the angry queer man outside of me wonders how much more they could have done if they would have allowed to… simply be? I think about this a lot reading the work of Gordon Dryland. I’ll be frank: I was unfamiliar with Dryland’s work. My only encounter was a mention in Shane Bosher’s ‘Firing the Canon’ from last year’s Playmarket Annual, where he quoted from Dryland’s unashamedly queer, strikingly progressive play, If I Bought Her The Wool; the title being an answer to the statement: “My mother made me a homosexual”. Dryland’s absence from my learning, and from the canon, is an indictment on how bad we are at looking back at our theatre history in general. How can we learn from something that isn’t recorded? Dryland’s heyday was before homosexuality was even legal in this country. While his work was on a few mainstages in the ‘70s and he picked up both critical and commercial success, he found it increasingly difficult to be programmed, and moved to Sydney for more opportunities. Tale as old as time. Jason Drowning seems shockingly dark, even for the time: Jason is a 60-year-old man who has recently been recovered from a lake after nearly drowning – although he insists that he actually did drown. Over two acts, he has tense, slightly absurdist banter with his longsuffering wife Freda – her character notes literally say ‘determined not to sympathise’ – and his brittle, darkly funny daughter Jennifer. It becomes clear, before long, that Jason intended to kill himself, and it’s not the first

time. The second half of the play takes an even darker turn when his family more or less shrug at his suicidal tendencies. His daughter’s response? “Are we to entertain him by the hour until he’s dead?” Even darker, is his wife’s: “So get over it or get it over with.” There’s also something quintessentially queer about Jason’s suicidal despair. The last scene in the play opens with a lengthy, gorgeously wrought monologue where he attempts to describe the feeling of not just nearly drowning, but actually drowning to his family: “I understood perfectly what was happening but I am at a loss to describe exactly what I felt. I was plunged into a terrifying abyss of remorse and guilt and shame – a horror beyond even your most desperate imagination. A minute part of me – the seed of my being – the basic atom of my existence – took panic and tried to wrench me from it.” I can’t read Jason Drowning without thinking as a sort of foggy mirror. Me, as a queer man looking back. Dryland, as a queer man looking straight down the barrel. Jason’s despair isn’t just coded as queer, it seems to be screaming queer. He’s a man who, after 60 years of living what appears to be a lie, would rather drown than be a drowned man breathing. It leads me to the question that makes me roll my eyes whenever it’s thrown at me: If a work by a queer playwright doesn’t tackle queer lives or queer issues, is it part of the queer canon? It’s a ludicrous question, implying sexuality is something that can be opted in or out of. A queer playwright views the world through that lens, as well as the lens of any other parts of their identity that intersect with that – race, class, gender. It’s a question that only exists to delegitimise. Queerness can be expressed in many ways now – beautiful, ugly, vibrant, boring as hell. As a queer playwright, everything I write is queer. Reading the work of Gordon Dryland, a trailblazer for a path lightly walked, makes me grateful that I don’t have to gird my writing devices like armour. They can be weapons, wielded ferociously, or they can be tools, poised to mend and to heal.

JASON’S DESPAIR ISN’T JUST CODED AS QUEER, IT SEEMS TO BE SCREAMING QUEER

ABOVE: Jason Drowning by Gordon Dryland, New Independent Theatre, 1981. Image: Ian Thomas.