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 A play about curing homosexuality that opens with a wanking scene, Heterodex is set to cause a stir in Sydney’s North Shore. Adam Bub reports.
Boldly depicting a medical professional’s efforts to cure his son’s homosexuality with a wonder drug, Ken Granneman and Dr Oliver O’Connell’s new play Heterodex doesn’t shy away from controversy, although its message is ultimately one of tolerance and sexual expression, free from medical interventions.
“It’s an ironic love story about two doctors who won’t admit their true feelings for each other. One of them becomes incredibly reactive about it and projects his denial onto the son,” Granneman tells SX.
There’s a lot of dark humour. I guess you couldn’t talk about a drug to alter people’s sexual preference without being a bit tongue-in-cheek and a bit dark.”
Heterodex originated in the minds of Granneman, the Star of the Sea Theatre’s Artistic Director, and O’Connell, the head of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. They applied the way that drug companies “trawl the human condition to create new marketplaces” to homosexuality, says Granneman, an area with a history of failed attempts at assimilation through ‘reparative’ therapies.
“It affirms that sexuality needs to be celebrated, be it up, down, sideways, or whatever,” Granneman asserts.
“People will hopefully come away thinking that the important thing in life is to be honest about your feelings.”
Granneman has taught drama for over 30 years with esteemed students such as Brendan Cowell (Love My Way) and Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High). In fact, Granneman claims to be the inspiration for Lilley’s popular creation, Mr G.
“I’ve always been Mr G. I wouldn’t say I was the only inspiration but I worked at Barker College, which was a very conservative school with their theatre choices. I had [Lilley] in a radical piece of theatre about a species regeneration station when he was in Year Ten. When I watched Summer Heights High, I noticed that there’s a lot of me in Mr G. [Lilley] denied it, but I’ve got the photographic evidence and his name in the program.”
Heterodex, like Mr G’s fictional Ecstasy play, is sure to stir up Sydney’s North Shore. In May, another unconventional gay-themed play staged at Belrose’s Glen Street Theatre, Strangers in Between, generated angry phone calls from subscribers over its ‘morally questionable’ material.
But Granneman’s not afraid of the minority of people who might think this way.
“Heterodex opens with a wanking scene and it has a Jewish research assistant who is a hooker and lap dancer, whose father is a QC. So I think it’s going to be fairly challenging,” he laughs.
“The Zenith Theatre has been couched in the general metropolitan theatre scene as a conservative theatre, and they do not want to be seen that way anymore. My idea of theatre is that what happens in the room is one thing but what happens when you walk out is another. You should go away feeling challenged. If you don’t, then it’s all a bit safe.”
Granneman and O’Connell’s next work, yet to be staged, is called Do You Do It: Bryce and Courtney do life.
“It’s fairly radical,” Granneman notes. “It has a talking penis.”
What more could you want?
Heterodex will play from Friday, August 1 – Monday, August 18, 8pm (3pm on Sundays) at the Zenith Theatre, Chatswood. Tickets are $30/$25, book on 9777 7555.
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Love is the drug
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