I got motorboated outside an aquatic centre. So I wrote a play about it.
Earlier this year, I had been speaking to Lara Kocsis after bumping out a show.
At the pub, I was telling her about a different show I’d been working on for Sydney Fringe.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“When I got motorboated outside Warringah Aquatic Centre in Year Eight.”
“You should make that the title of the play.”
And while I did consider it, I told her that the title was and would remain She’ll Be Right.
I loved my teen years. Sneaking vodka into plastic water bottles before a party, frothing over Dylan O’Brien in The Maze Runner, drunkenly eating cold sand-covered Dominos at the Saturday night beach gatho.
But I also remember Year 10 boys competing to see how many Year Seven girls’ arses they could slap at the school disco while Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines blasted in the background.
Boys who’d play ‘Firetruck’ up my leg in Year Eight science, and people sharing half naked photos of the girl who drank too many Double Blacks at her mate’s 16th birthday party and whispering that “she did it all for attention”.
Off come the rose-tinted glasses.
Looking back at my youth, we treated sex, consent and sexual harassment as a big joke. We put so much pressure on ourselves to meet these high standards of sexualisation at such a young age that the lines between consent and coercion became highly blurred.
She’ll Be Right touches on these themes and stories by asking ‘if we had received earlier and holistic consent education, would things be different?’
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like taking life too seriously. And that’s something I wanted to incorporate into this show. Yes, it’s dark in parts, but overall it’s is a comedy. A dark one, but still a comedy.
Because even reminiscing with my girlfriends now about these horrible things that we’d experienced in our teens, we find ourselves laughing. Not because these experiences were funny per se, but funny in the ‘I can’t believe we thought this was acceptable and appropriate behaviour’ way.
Like, of course I let someone motorboat me outside Warringah Aquatic Centre in broad daylight during the school holidays! Because I thought that was a normal thing that you were meant to do as a teenage girl! I’m sure the boy who did it would also find it similarly funny looking back now (I hope).
Sometimes I find that if we can’t laugh at our past, we’ll cry.
And I wanted to write a play that you can laugh, cry and cringe at, while also saying something important at the same time. Director Dominique Purdue has approached this script with so much fun, care and joy, only made better by my hilarious cast members Sophie Teo and Lara Kocsis.
Umai Shantharajah (Assistant Director), Brock Cramond (Assistant Producer/Sound Design) and Benjamen Escott (Choreographer) complete the creative team with so many excellent ideas that have shaped the production.
She’ll Be Right is a fun, chaotic and relevant show that I hope audiences will love, with characters from your adolescence that will make you say “I knew that person” or “I WAS that person”.
She’ll Be Right will be playing at the Emerging Artist Sharehouse at 6:00pm from September 22 – 26 as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival. Tickets are available here.
