An ostensibly gay couple sit in marriage counselling, laying bare mundane tribulations in unreliable monologues and duelling dialogues in front of an audience. Who gets stuck doing the dishes? Who hogs the blanket?
It is only during this counselling session in the new comedy-drama play Unconditional that one partner, sweet and socially conservative, finally realises his other half has been chemically transitioning from “he” to “she” for months – without telling him. “Holy shit,” the man says. “Am I straight now?”
The two unnamed characters in Unconditional are based on the experiences of Brisbane-based actor and writer Seán Dowling as a trans woman, and actor and writer Cameron Hurry’s coming out as a gay man in a religious, conservative household.
Unconditional is one of two plays at this year’s Brisbane festival examining what happens in a relationship when one partner transitions. Both plays – the other being The Making of Pinocchio, a live action and puppet fantasia – will coax audiences into deeper understanding and a greater emotional connection with trans lives – and may even encourage some to consider how their own identities are ever-evolving or, as Dowling puts it, “make the mainstream more queer”.
Is it common for one person’s gender transition to destabilise their partner’s sense of self? “There’s a whole lot of that,” says Dowling, 42, who has been taking gender affirming hormones for two years. “I know plenty of trans people whose relationships have broken because of it, because it is such a complex thing.
“Despite what we say to ourselves, we are always evolving and growing and changing with time, but we don’t like to think about that; we like to think of ourselves as set and stable in regard to who we are, and to have something like this thrown in the mix is very confronting,” she adds.
“The acknowledgment that we are all unfinished masterpieces as we grow is a scary fucking thought.”
Dowling always considered herself bisexual (“now the term people would use is pansexual”) and has been married twice, each time to a cisgender woman. Her first marriage ended in divorce, before she transitioned; her second wife, Ash, has been “wonderfully supportive” of her gender affirmation.
But when Hurry spoke to Ash while writing his role in Unconditional, she revealed that, when Dowling began transitioning, friends made comments like, “No one’s going to judge you if you bail”, or the more coded, “You didn’t sign up for this”.
Ash immediately drew on her “strength of personality” and challenged the doubters, says Dowling: “I think it was very hard for her, but she is a kind and compassionate soul and has found her way to support me.” (Ash declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Dowling’s character in Unconditional, meanwhile, “sees herself as a constantly changing, evolving and growing creature”, but the portrayal is focused on depth rather than self-flattery: “I’m an obnoxious shithead in it.”
Dowling’s personal future challenges include finding “$20,000 to $30,000 from somewhere” for gender-affirming surgery, which is difficult to access in Australia. “Have I transitioned fully, and reached my final form? Who the fuck knows – and isn’t that a wonderful thing to celebrate?”
In The Making of Pinocchio, to be staged live in Brisbane after debuting online for Glasgow’s Take Me Somewhere festival during Covid lockdowns in 2021, longtime collaborators and life partners Ivor MacAskill and Rosana Cade deploy the fairytale of the wooden boy who comes to life to ask, as Cade puts it: “As queer people, are we trying to mould ourselves into existing categories, in order to be seen as real?”
MacAskill and Cade met 16 years ago, when Cade moved from England to Glasgow to study contemporary performance. They began making theatre work together, and became a romantic couple in 2013. Five years later, MacAskill began transitioning.
By placing their own relationship at the centre of the Pinocchio story, their lives become entangled in the fantasy “as a metaphor for us about how we make ourselves”, says Cade.
Cade says MacAskill’s gender transition “has been an amazing gift to me, something I didn’t expect to happen … I’ve started identifying as non-binary. We’re recognising ourselves as part of a long, queer lineage.”
Cade previously identified as a lesbian, but now things are a bit more complicated. “When I imagined my future, I thought it was going to be as two old women, I thought that was my sexuality,” they say. “When Ivor first came out as trans, of course we had questions of what that would mean for our relationship, because [I said] ‘I think I’m mainly attracted to women, but I know I love you.’”
MacAskill’s experience as a trans man “showed me how much fluidity there is, even in terms of sexuality as well, which I hadn’t anticipated”, says Cade. “I would say something has opened up inside me.”
For his part, the show freed MacAskill to abandon a “pathologising, traumatising” narrative of his life that had been necessary to call upon when seeking gender-affirming care, “when what I found is realising my transness has been joyful and amazing”, he says. (He acknowledges he was fortunate to be able to afford private healthcare.)
Despite both plays being very different in their staging – Unconditional in its sparse naturalism and The Making of Pinocchio with its technical flights of fancy – the aim of both stories is to be funny and relatable, and to win hearts and minds.
Cade says some audience members who are “not really sure how they felt about trans people” before seeing The Making of Pinocchio have felt “emotionally connected to us and who we are and our story”.
Theatre is “a space of possibilities, a space of change”, they add; and their relationship with MacAskill could be seen as “a microcosm for how society could be responding to trans people”.
“We could be opening ourselves up to all the possibility and potential trans people offer us in the world,” they say. “In order to love trans people, it’s not just about acceptance, it’s about all of society changing in response to them.”
In Unconditional, Dowling too wants to find the universal in the personal.
“If you want to change people, persuade hearts and minds, then they need to see themselves in it,” she says. “I want middle-aged cisgendered women to see me on stage and go, ‘Fuck, I know exactly what she means.’”
Unconditional is at the Underground theatre, Brisbane 30 August-9 September; The Making of Pinocchio is at Brisbane Powerhouse 13-16 September
