Above: Married coupling of convenience, safety and attempted deceit: cast members (l to r) Jordan Thompson as Millie, Dominique Purdue as Norma, Luke Visentin as Bob and Brock Cramond as Jim. Photo credit: Bob Seary.
New Theatre’s current slick production of Topher Payne’s Perfect Arrangement (2013) as part of the Mardi Gras + Festival is a solid choice, worthwhile, and appealing to a mixed audience. It has a perfect retro edge, well-meshed characters, caricatures and a decent, well-costumed fleshing out of the disturbed McCarthyism times in 1950s America.
The bright set has lashings of US red and blue and a portrait of President Truman with his eyes blocked out in the background. This is a fine arena for the comings and goings of gay men and women hiding out, conservatives, radicals and undercover gays and lesbians working in the US State Department or hiding behind closed doors in the suburbs.
Above: Jordan Thompson as Millie and Brooke Ryan in the role of Kitty. Photo credit: Bob Seary.
As it is here at New Theatre this Mardi Gras with this piece’s momentum and seeping gravitas/activism well-maintained and painted by a great ensemble cast plus deft, evocative leadership and impactful design by director Patrick Kennedy.
Blind, non-worldly, wifey conservatism is vividly brought to life here by Brook Ryan as Kitty. She is the strangely childless wife of government deviant hunter Theodore Sunderson. Deviant here means a gay, possibly morally loose Communist Sunderson is played with sufficient, dutiful contrast by Huxley Forras).
Kitty in Brooke Ryan’s hands barges with sitcom, farcical excellence into the faux-nuptial home of housewife Millie and Bob, a man also from the department. This forever childless couple live right by working wife Norma and her husband in eyes of the public, Jim, who live without children too.
Above: Jordan Thompson as Mille with Dominique Purdue as Norma. Photo credit: Bob Seary.
The actors playing these conveniently married gay couples fill out the deceit well in early scenes. The picture perfect social scenes, convince, complete with product-promo ad breaks in the style of early studio TV filming. This ensemble is guided in this production to give us a convincing veneer of non-threatening normality then turn on the script’s knife edge behind closed blue doors to reveal that McCarthyist government workers Bob and Norma live with their same sex partners Millie and Jim, doing hilarious switches back for the public eye.
But this subterfuge has inevtable cracks in it, even by Truman era standards. As realised with histrionic dread by clever, camp schoolteacher Jim (played with golden humanity, priceless energy and ease by Brock Cramond) fitting in and sneaking around and keeping track on intended and intercepted operator-assisted calls on the red telephone is a hectic ‘choice’.
Jim’s boyfriend (that is Bob, depicted with straight-up, evasive stoicism by Luke Visentin) is enamoured of the perfect arrangement of marrying lesbians to be gay under the risky 1950s radar of suspicion. But this arrangement is fraught with danger, hurried intimacy and the duplicity of State Department employees helping to hunt down, shame, fire and destroy their own.
The wives here are gutsy, elegant and strong, so well scripted and perhaps in more control than the husbands. Played with typical perfect timing for this New Theatre stage they are strikingly, fittingly costumed for the era. This same sex couple and couple of girls enduring the men in control of bad, even cruel decisions are played with impressive nuanced trajectories. And a retro timber coffee table complete with magazines of famous, attractive female movie stars to have a furtive or languorous look at.
Above: Dominique Purdue as Norma and Lucinda Jurd as Barbara Grant. Photo credit: Bob Seary.
Dominique Purdue’s strength and stage presence pleases. As the State Department secretary who has seen too much and had enough, but is tortured by maternal urges, her loaded, conflicted character is smoothly executed. Jordan Thompson’s Millie has a gorgeous, high energy swoop, across the stage. Her variegated story is told in measured and high energy hues and attractive integrity by Thompson.
Entering as a villain and paramour from the secret past, as a multilingual accountant, a sexually adventurous spinster, the character of Barbara Grant (drawn with clear, sure lines by Lucinda Jurd) is a woman deserving of government suspicion at this time. Jurt’s reading of this role and her contrasted physicality is another gem of this Mardi Gras, post-Truman, McCarthyism-regretting second Trump Administration romp.
Bobbing its head up for air amidst the humour, hurriedness, fruity half-farce in this piece is some real disturbing heartache, and pressure, plus questionable choices that were believable during this time. The complex characters are tempted by emerging activism, but Topher Payne does not leave their differing strength levels neatly tidied up at all.
This strong cast entertains in a bright package, tossing up plenty of questions from the worsening melee of what was a questionable tranche de rainbow past. As this is an American tale, one wonders what a production team and cast could achieve with a local story in Sydney at this time of year. For now, this is great festival fare. Get your ruby slippers out for a decent trip off the neat film-set garden path to where the brick road is a tainted, taunted yellow and tricky.
