Presented by theatrePUNK Co at BackDock Arts, Harrison Mills’ PASHUN was an absurd and amusing theatre piece about a group of young people navigating love, sex, friends, and relationships. Directed by Joshua Price, with dramaturgy by El Waddingham, PASHUN used a university poetry assignment about discomfort as the catalyst for a relationship in one-minute increments and a hedonistic house party.
PASHUN opened with each character responding to a series of unheard survey questions about love, setting the tone of their character for the rest of the work. Tiff (Zara Chandler) is desperate for a date with Rory (Ewan Robertson) and laments the difficulty of being a straight girl in a gay world to her queer best friends Kai (Cullyn Beckton) and Emma (Naticia Slade). Meanwhile, Rory’s twin sister Lena (Rachael Woodnett) is having a relationship with Conner (Keegan Bell) in one-minute increments, and Conner’s friend Andrew (Scott Kift) is being drawn into increasingly dehumanising shenanigans by his landlord/housemate SIGMA (Emma Stratton), an Andrew-Tate-esque vlogger and self-styled alpha male masculinity expert. All of the actors played their characters believably, and Stratton’s exaggerated characterisation of Sigma was a comic highlight. Importantly, the actors seemed to be having fun as well.
Almost all of the characters are connected to the university poetry class, and an assignment that centres on discomfort. PASHUN covered a wide range of themes as it depicted young people navigating love, sex, identity, romantic and platonic relationships, and all the messiness and seemingly high stakes that come with these. It dealt with embarrassment, regret, and validation, touching on homophobia and bi-erasure as well as examining relationships in the digital age. PASHUN also contained specific local references and things that feel familiar to any former arts students (in Brisbane, and presumably more broadly), like complaints of heterosexuals infiltrating The Beat and a poetry tutor who called everyone ‘comrade’.
The staging was full of movement, and the play itself was broken into short scenes that maintained momentum on each characters’ storyline. At several points, characters spoke directly to the audience, from Sigma’s gag-inducing lectures to Emma and Tiff’s drunken heckling. A sex scene told in freeze frames was both funny and memorable, as was an attempt at the iconic Dirty Dancing lift.
Lighting designed by Phoebe Quinn incorporated plenty of colour to set the mood and affirm the setting. Flashing lights added interest/texture to the movement sequences, backed by a high-energy soundtrack, and spotlights were shifted onto audience members during some moments of the play. Costuming clearly distinguished the characters, and changes throughout the play showed time passing and shifting settings. A number of cardboard boxes were versatile props throughout the performance, used as seats for the opening scenes and then upended, full of rubbish, to populate the later scenes.
The poetry assignment is an anchor point throughout the performance, and PASHUN concluded with Conner’s finished poem, contemplating the importance of passion and how it makes suffering worthwhile.
Through absurd escalations and comical chaos, PASHUN is about the passion and intensity of being young, and the vitality of maintaining this passion in some form as life goes on.
PASHUN was performed at BackDock Arts, Fortitude Valley, from 8 – 10 September 2023.
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