Award-winning playwright Shane Woon (A Guide To Being Immortal) continues his exploration of Chinese mythology and Australian culture with an epic love story that transcends space and time. Mixing Chinese fantasy cinema, Boy Love drama and the AFL, his new play is a tender mythic story of love, identity, and the weight of expectation.
The Rabbit God Tu’er Shen has already died for love. Now he’s the god of gay matchmaking, pairing soulmates with celestial red thread, while searching for the happily-ever-after he never got. Whenever his first love pops up in a new life, Rabbit abandons heaven to follow him, risking his powers and his reputation for just one perfect ending. The results have always been tragic, chaotic, and occasionally embarrassing. But now his long-lost lover has returned as Watson, a rising AFL player, and Rabbit is determined that in this lifetime love will finally go his way.
This is a tender queer love story about two young Chinese Australian men from different worlds, each wrestling with love, desire, fear and duty. The play leans into the genre of the Boy Love drama, full of romance and longing, as a vehicle for exploring the worlds of these two original characters who meet as teenage lion dancers and fall in love. As adults, Rabbit juggles divine duties, his career as a school teacher trying to make things better for the next generation, and the fear of once again losing his love, whilst Watson faces media scrutiny, family expectations and the constraints of a public sporting culture steeped in rigid ideas of masculinity.
Directed by Keith Brockett, Rabbit & Watson is a big-hearted, expansive celebration of Chinese Australian identity, exploring myths carried across the oceans in an Australian setting, and drawing on a range of classical and contemporary artforms and cultural references. From the football field to the media scrum to the celestial realm, this is a story about finding true love, and what comes after.
“I wrote this play to provide a platform for Chinese Australian artists, and to invite audiences to see and share in our cultural references, humour, and desires,” says Woon. “As a high school teacher, I wanted young diverse people to see and share in the experience of having non-dominant identities seen on stage. As a footy fan, I wanted to look closely at the pressures that shape the AFL and how its culture affects ideas of queerness, masculinity, and belonging at different levels of society.”
July 15 – 26
