By Helen Musa

A play titled 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche is not the obvious choice for a company called Everyman Theatre, but there’s method in the madness of director Jarrad West, who’s staging the cult comedy at ACT Hub soon.

Written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, the co-artistic directors of the New Colony Theatre in Chicago, and named Best Overall Production at the 2012 New York International Fringe Festival, the play catapults us into 1956, where the Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein has gathered for its annual breakfast and quiche.

Oh, yes, and regardless of gender, audience members are co-opted as honorary members of the society and given sisterly names.

Billed as “a tasty recipe of hysterical laughs, sexual innuendos, unsuccessful repressions and delicious discoveries”, it’s filled with idiosyncratic characters: Vern Schultz, the facilities manager; Ginny Cadbury, the secretary; Wren Robin, the events chairwoman; Dale Prist, the historian; and Lulie Stanwyck, the president, a feast for five clever actors.

West tells me he was first alerted to the script a couple of years ago when former Canberra actor Hannah Ley, who now lives in England, told him about the riotous production she’d seen there.

“I got a script, it was really hilarious,” West says. “It’s silly and fun, just as theatre at the moment needs to be.” He tried it out at ACT Hub’s 24-hour Hub-THON in May.

“It very much plays to the period, 1956. It could be anywhere in the USA,” he says, adding that in those days of the Cold War, reds under the beds and suburban niceness, such a group of women meeting would have been called “widows”, but of course they all have a big secret.

“The secret is in the title,” he points out.

When an atomic bomb alarm sounds just as the society’s prize-winning quiche is about to be announced, they are all stuck in the dining room where the five ladies come to the realisation that they are all lesbians and that, faced with the possible end of the world, they can be honest at last.

Each of the characters has her own individual coming-out sequence, all played to the hilt by an all-star cast of Steph Roberts, Ylaria Rogers, Meaghan Stewart, Sian Harrington and Crystal Mahon, who, West says, “all work so well together.”

“Everyman Theatre always likes to look at queer stories where we can, but we’ve never done a play that is specifically a lesbian story, although there was a lesbian relationship in Rent years ago,” West says. “I thought it was about time.”

And the important question: will there be a lot of quiche involved? An enormous amount, he assures me, but it’ll be eaten by the cast and not the audience, although some American productions have included catering.

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, ACT Hub, Kingston, July 17-August 1.

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