2012 Edmonton Fringe Village of the Fringed Review: The Question

Well, I had a good fag-free run this year. Unfortunately, it all came a-crashing down around me at The Question.

I guess had I investigated I would have found the rainbow-hued logo of the production company and gotten suspicious.

So anyways, this story is about a couple of poofters (whom we shall call KindaFemmy and ExtremelyFemmy for semi-obvious reasons) who are raising the world's most unfortunate 17 year old girl. It seems this play takes place in a future (good sense implies 18+ years away, for reasons which may not be as obvious) where a mysterious man called "Dr. van der Hauk" has been performing human genetic experimentation. As the play opens, the authorities have begun to investigate his work which it has recently been revealed is a lot more extreme and less ethical than prevailing public opinion had been. And public opinion has been split.

As the play opens, Maria (the poor girl stuck being raised by a couple homos) and her friend Alyssa are going over their high school projects which seem to be revolving around Dr. van der Hauk's experimentation programs. It's sort of teased that there's a nefarious purpose to this, that the school is using these homework assignments as a method of flushing the truth out...then it's immediately dropped and never ever ever comes up again.

While the girls are talking about dancing with boys in what certainly sounds like a crude imitation of normal people's (or in this case, teenaged girls) conversations regarding sex as it would be interpreted by a flamer...which, of course, it is...KindaFemmy is concerned that ExtremelyFemmy is acting weird and down in the dumps. In a neat bit of interspacing where the upstairs and downstairs conversations alternate between "on" and "paused" the plot and its twin threads are revealed: KindaFemmy has been holding out on Maria the truth about her mother, and now it appears that ExtremelyFemmy has been holding out on the real truth about Maria's mother from KindaFemmy. It all comes to a head [thank you, ladies and gentlemen! enjoy the veal! -ed] when Maria's school project about her genetic lineage forces us to learn that van der Hauk did some fancy DNA splicing and replaced the genetic material in a woman's egg with ExtremelyFemmy's DNA, which was what the frozen sperm from KindaFemmy impregnated.

It doesn't learn, come to think of it, from an honest expressive moment between the characters (who could explain "honest expressive" to you about as much as they could explain what boobies feel like) or from an investigative scene where the pieces fall together, but rather from a YouTube video of an old news report, which sort of screamed lazy writing. It also lends itself to the logical assumption that present day is before Maria was hatched in a lab, along with perhaps the silliest plot point imaginable.

You see, crazy ol' Doc Hauk wasn't just using ExtremelyFemmy's genetic material to make him into Maria's mother, no sir Bob. In a video we learn that ExtremelyFemmy actually got the egg implanted in him and became pregnant, a plot point that not only makes no sense scientifically but in the service of the plot as well. You see, a man could only get pregnant with something called an artificial Ectopic pregnancy, which in nature is extremely dangerous. It's theoretically possible but with great risk and relatively little reward. It's certainly not the sort of thing you would do with your groundbreaking process of making a child from the genetic material of two men: not when millions of female uterii are standing by and ready to be utilized. It would be like inventing a revolutionary and expensive new propulsion system for aircraft and then testing it on an airplane that you've deliberately dropped a bomb on first. It also would remove the control from your experiment: what if Maria came out wrong? Was it because of your crazy genetic materials swap? Or your crazy male pregnancy swap?

From the story's perspective it makes no sense either: a man becoming impregnated (and then walking around in public) would be big news. Indeed, it was big news -- KindaFemmy watched it on the actual news (or an archive thereof). So why was it that this pregnancy (which must not have happened yet in "our" world or we'd remember it too) existing and being the responsibility of Dr. van der Hauk the "trigger" that told KindaFemmy about the truth? It seems from the news that he watched (and we didn't) that ExtremelyFemmy wasn't shown on screen as the pregnant man, but knowing that there was a pregnant man and that he was a van der Hauk experiment doesn't imply that ExtremelyFemmy was the man or that Maria was the offspring. But it's the reveal, and then they talk about it, so I guess it was. So KindaFemmy didn't think it was weird that during the 9 months he didn't see ExtremelyFemmy there were news reports about van der Hauk (who was ExtremelyFemmy's boss both "then" and "now") creating a pregnant man, and then came back to a newborn baby who he was told was a result of van der Hauk's experiments and would need to be regularly studied? He never pieced it together then, when it was live in front of him, but has figured it out now? I mean seriously, that's like having a loved one mysteriously disappear during their "business trip in Atlanta" on September 11th 2001, and then figuring out in 2027 -- using nothing but 2001-era 9/11 coverage -- that they were having a secret affair in New York City and she worked at Tower Two.

So anyways, the Big Truth is revealed: a large amount of drama takes place: arguments are had, Maria gets mad and moves away, KindaFemmy walks out, and ExtremelyFemmy is left with his head down sobbing as his life falls apart entirely because it turns out everybody who isn't Dr. van der Hauk's lab assistant is pretty much creeped out by his weird genetic modification research. (A minor plot point, KindaFemmy is one of these nuts worried about GMOs, which will again be a plot point for precisely 15 milliseconds and then never come up ever ever again). As it starts to look like he may have an arc, that he may have to fess up to his enthusiastic role in the birth of Maria and accept that his new life doesn't feature his fudge packing buddy and the teenaged girl to whom he's given the biggest "Kick Me" sign in human history (oh, wait, is Suri Cruise a teenager at this point?). Or he has to eat crow, admit that what he did was wrong, and beg forgiveness or repudiate the experiments. Or try to have his cake and eat it to, give an impassioned speech about how what he did was good and right and important for humanity and encourage Maria and the other sodomite to endure the initial hardship for long term benefit.

Or, alternately, he can wake up from his nightmare and find that it's Opposite Day now: Maria is totally cool that she's a genetically modified freak without even the benefit of super powers, KindaFemmy is so proud that his daughter is the result of hugely public and reviled experimentation that is about to have its finer details poured over in the media and legal system, and everybody's one big happy fake family. No, seriously, that's the ending. The characters stopped acting like real (though badly acted) people and started badly acting like implausibly fake people. And then everybody's happy at the end, hoorah!

Hey, what about the tough questions about bioethics in genetics, experimenting on human beings, extreme genetic alterations, and what it all means to individual human beings, humanity as a whole, and the human condition (and the very notion of it) in general? Ah screw it, this is just a play about sperm gurglers being happy. So what if it doesn't deliver on its promises?

This is a play where the girls, despite their youth, are better actors than the -- men? The dialogue is clunky and awful, but at least the girls interact with each other and move about the space they occupy in what can pass for realistic. The lead actors are either so uncomfortable with the material or each other that they walk around like they have a stick up their ass and are waiting to escape to the warm light of day. [the veal was delicious, wasn't it? -ed]

Final word: Can fags pretend to act like real people? That is The Question, and the answer unsurprisingly turns out to be "no".