By Darby Turnbull
Over the last few years in Naarm Dax Carnay and her company Tayo Tayo collective have established themselves as a forceful independent theatre practitioner known for her eye-catching titles and her heartfelt, witty queering of genre Trans woman kills influencer, a Rashomen style noir and The Six Guys an Immigrant Trans Person of Colour will Date in Melbourne, a romantic comedy. In Chasing Dick Carnay returns to the trappings of the Rom Com genre once again showing that unlike many people attempting to revive the genre she has the understanding, vision and wit to make the much misunderstood and frequently maligned genre feel invigoratingly, movingly prescient. I’ve always seen romantic comedy as a channel with which to view the values and state of our society and the people within it through romance. It happened one night (1934) explored class differences and growing consciousness of them during the Great Depression, Pretty Woman the cynical individualism of neoliberalist capitalism, You’ve got Mail, gentrification and the pervasive rise of online communication and its effect on modern courting. Romantic Comedy far from being trivial can be a conduit to explore gender, class, changing social mores through one of the most primal and relatable human transactions we have.
The limits of that have always been that the people chosen to represent those experiences have historically been mostly white, heterosexual, cis gender and financially and socially affluent. That’s where Carnay comes in, ferociously making a place for herself in a genre that’s ignored her. As I was musing on comparisons to Carnay’s leading lady predecessors, I thought of the irresistible effervescence of early career Julia Roberts; with her mile long smile, Meg Ryans wistful romanticism, Goldie Hawn’s ability to deploy physical comedy in ways that reveal everything about a character’s emotional state in a moment. Then I was reminded of what they all had in common and how the cannon has conspired to make these names our first point of reference.
Chasing Dick finds Carnay’s titular character, she calls herself ‘Dick’ because she has one, it’s a bit she does, in the middle of a toxic love triangle with a father and son in a small town. Carnay’s decision to centre the two men and their emotional development initially puzzled me and whilst these men are frequently tedious, self-important and grating it’s rather the point, Carnay holds up a mirror to her cis audience and offers them a way to improve.
Matthew Richard Walsh is excellently brittle as the strait- laced, repressed and deeply lost late bloomer ‘Dad’ who Dick christens ‘Ducky’ after the Pretty in pink character (which if a man is a Ducky, run as far as your docs will take you). He movingly conveys the suffocation of a heteronormative existence that has ultimately left his life empty and his boyish infatuation with Dick and their meetcutes brim with possibility, but he doesn’t err from the pathetic self-destructive side of his character layering even his most charming moments with a neediness and performative woundedness.
Luke Visentin as ‘Son’ gives an intelligently measured performance as the preening, solipsistically progressive millennial. There’s something compellingly off putting about his presence right from the beginning; delivering his lines with a velveteen tinge as if he’s seducing himself as well as Dick.
Carnay is very adept in her depiction of two very specific kinds of men who would fixate on a woman like her. Son’s bisexuality and mild gender queerness (he wears nail polish) leads him to draw false equivalency with Dick’s experiences as a trans femme person of colour and the vicious tantrums he throws when called on it speak volumes about the shallowness of his self-described progressiveness, Visentin incorporates some terrifying edges to him, a penetrating, hungry gaze that never seems to blink and a superficial charm that works in fits and starts but exposes more than envelops.
Walsh’s Ducky by contrast just can’t see her as the woman she is but still worships at the altar of the ‘exotic’, liberated self she represents.
Neither can really see her and they make it transparently obvious.
The strongest moments come when Carnay shows the exhaustion of being put in the position to enlighten these two stunted men ‘in the grand plot of your lives, I was a twist but for me it was Wednesday’! She throws herself wholeheartedly into some passionate speeches about the costs and rewards of living an authentic self and she excels as the one character either aware or one step away from being aware of the kind of story she’s in; she may think she’s a hot mess heartbreaker but she’s miles ahead of these two boys and they’re obstacles to the space she needs for self-reflection.
Carnay’s text combines the spiky knowingness of Nora Ephron and the screwball elements of 1930’s comedy of manners which make for a very solid addition to the cannon but I sometimes found myself wishing for more subversion of the genre and character types instead of devoting so much time to exposition and repeated and lengthy explorations into the emotional lives of the father and son whilst Dick is frequently put into the role of enlightener, albeit a fed up one. At its best it exposes the noxious elements of romantic leading men and the thin characterisations of the women opposite them when their presence is designed to develop their own sense of self. Thankfully Chasing Dick rages against that, hilariously.
Co-Directed with James Lau the production is playful yet efficient, Filipe Filia’s white curtains, combined with Jordan Hanrahan-Carnay’s cinematic projections showing fractured parts of the regional town are elegant and provide a seamless and open playing space.
Originally commissioned by the Festival of Australian Queer theatre this is an example of how essential it is to support and platform the development of new work by exciting and original voices.
Image: Alex Winner
