'What do a transvestite, an ageing shearer, a retired prostitute and a famous footballer have in common? All find themselves in a cabaret venue late one night after the show – and all are looking for love. Peter Kenna’s masterful and touching one-Act play was first performed in 1975, and has lost none of its bittersweet emotion. By turns moving, funny and terrifying, this play is a powerful record of a time when love could not always speak its name.'
(Source: publisher's blurb)
Alison Lyssa describes the play thus: "In Pinball, a lesbian mother, whose name is Theenie, is threatened with the loss of custody of her much loved child unless she gives up her lover and conforms to her family's idea of what she ought to be, a compliant, dutiful daughter and wife. Her father, her brother and the judge Solomon regard Theenie's search for her own truth as so dangerous they draw on centuries of tradition to try to control the language she uses and the very ground she walks on. Theenie has a very different fate from such famous female figures of myth and theatre as Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia whose father sacrifices her so that he can get a fair wind to speed his army over the water to Troy, or Shakespeare's Ophelia, who dies because her father, King Lear, refuses to listen to the truth that she expresses. In Pinball, Theenie is not isolated from a supportive community. As well as the love of Axis, the pivot of her world, Theenie has the support of the women's movement, represented on stage by Vandalope, an anarcho-lesbian bicyclist whose name is a mixture of vandalism and hope. In court Vandalope and Theenie challenge Solomon's powerful prejudices with counter images of wit, wisdom, dignity, selfhood and love."
Source: https://www.academia.edu/4969482/On_the_Writing_of_Pinball Relating to the 2014 production by Duck Duck Goose Theatre for Mardi Gras.
What do They Call Me? raises questions regarding both lesbian and Aboriginal identity. The three monologues which comprise the play are intricately interwoven and each presents a different view on the impact of legislation from the 1940s through to the 1970s.
Although thrown into jail, Connie Brumbie is at least allowed her Aboriginality. On the other hand, Connie's daughter Regina has been denied knowledge of her true racial background. Having uncovered the fiction of her Eurasian heritage, Regina spends ten years trying to come to terms with her blackness. Regina's sister Alison points out, based on the insights gained through her engagement with radical feminism, finding an identity is not so simple.
The play makes it painfully obvious that we live in a culture subject to the extremes of stereotyping and name-calling. Source: Australian Gay and Lesbian Plays (1996)
