Very little inspires madness and mania like the quest to find (and keep) love. From stage classics like Romeo and Juliet to self-help essentials like He’s Just Not That Into You, artists and authors have long sought to bring their thoughts on the subject to the fore.
Which makes the trifecta of love, dating, and relationships a deliciously rich topic for Fringe Festival performers to explore, with many mining their diaries, family histories and Twitter feeds for inspiration. And, this being Fringe, the results aren’t your typical romantic romps: if you’re looking for the passionate, PG embrace of Ryan Gosling, you’re more likely to find Michael Fassbender’s big swingin’ dick.
Case and point, on stages across Vancouver this year you’ll see courting serial killers, Catholic sex talks and Kama Sutra-loving clowns. Meanwhile, an Australian single woman dives into the world of online dating in The Situation; Buy Me Dinner First reveals dating’s “disgusting side” through sketch comedy; and, in Mrs. Singh and Me, we find a Hindu man in love with a Sikh woman, but instead of winning her parents over with rousing dinner conversation, he kidnaps her mom.
In topical fashion, Vancouver single and Fringe newcomer Christina Andreola tackles the tech-fueled dating apocalypse with The Dudes of My Life, including such lowlights as letting her Italian parents Tinder for her, and live-Tweeting a disastrous date. And on the more poignant end, anchoring all that is right with romance, former CBC radio director Susan Freedman tells the story of her parents’ 64-year relationship through their love letters in Spilling Family Secrets.
But one of the most compelling offerings this year is Eleanor O’Brien’s Lust & Marriage, the true-ish tale of meeting her soul mate at Burning Man, and finding out he’s not a one-woman kind of guy. They eventually get married, but O’Brien struggles with being in an open relationship.
“A lot of what I make art about is what I am wrestling with in my own life,” says O’Brien, calling from the road on a summer-long tour. “My husband and I have been in an open relationship from the beginning. This show is working through a lot of my issues with polyamory and monogamy, and the nature of love and lust.”
The play was also inspired by the widely read sex column Savage Love.
“It was this influence of Dan Savage asking for calls in his column from people who had successful open relationships,” explains O’Brien. “We don’t hear those stories as often as we hear the stories where it didn’t work.
“I struggle with the concept with success or failure in relationships,” she adds. “We have this idea that, if it lasts it’s a success, if it ends it was a failure...”
O’Brien’s company, Dance Naked Productions, is dedicated to sex-positive performance. The Portland actress was last in town in 2005 with her BDSM piece GGG: Dominatrix for Dummies, which evolved from a one-star disaster into a spectacular Fringe success. Dominatrix, O’Brien recalls, was about self-acceptance; Lust & Marriage– featuring dramaturgy by Fringe favourite TJ Dawe – focuses on the essence of jealousy and desire.
“I read The Ethical Slut [A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Adventures] when I was in college, and the idea of having sexual autonomy really appealed to me,” explains O’Brien. “I’d always been really interested in sex, and I think also fearful of being cheated on, and had this suspicion in my mind that, you know, monogamy doesn’t really make sense. [Polyamory] appealed to my sense of freedom and fairness.
“Which is not to say that it doesn’t sometimes really suck ass!” she laughs.
The character of Emily, then, is completely entwined with O’Brien’s own experiences – positive and negative.
“It’s not a prescriptive show. It’s not like, ‘Here’s how to make polyamory work.’” she asserts. “What I’m trying to do is suggest that you have a choice. You get to design what works for your and your partner. Or partners...”
Tonya Jone Miller has her own intimate experiences with the illusion of monogamy. The Portland-based phone-sex veteran has turned a career of whispering fantasies into the ears of single, dating, and “happily” married men into a one-woman show called A Story of O’s.
The performance begins with the first phone call Miller ever received.
“I just jump right in,” says Miller, calling from the Indianapolis Fringe, where she is touring Threads, the story of her Vietnamese-American heritage.
“It lasted about a minute, maybe,” she recalls with a chuckle. “I had just gotten to the good stuff when I heard him have a ginormous orgasm and hang up on me.”
Miller began working as a phone-sex operator in 2003, after a classmate at the Portland Actors Conservatory mentioned she was looking into it. Miller applied to a service, and two months later started receiving calls. Within a year, she co-owned the company.
“A) I’m really good on the phone, and B) at any job I do, I always work my way up pretty damn quickly,” says Miller, who, at her busiest, was grossing upwards of $80,000 annually.
“I have a really strong work ethic,” she adds. And indeed, Miller ultimately had to end our conversation because she was expecting a call from a client.
Some of what Miller hears in her line of work is dark, some of it – fantasies of incest, bestiality, rape – is illegal, and she admits it can be draining to work so much in her head. But A Story of O’s is, at its core, a glimpse at intimacy through an industry few understand.
“It’s not at all what people expect, and that’s part of why I wrote the show,” says the four-time Best of Fest winner. “Phone-sex is the last bastion of the extreme, of the really extreme, or illegal. You can pay a ‘cam girl’ to do exactly what you want, but if you have a fantasy like a vampire succubus masturbating while you’re chained up in a cage and she’s drawing your life force out of you? I mean, no cam girl is going to be able to pull that off.”
Through an extended erotic improv, Miller acts out her experiences with a wide variety of clients, some of whom have been calling her for 10 years, including a handful she’s met in person.
“I do the calls so that people can hear my side of things for themselves and draw their own conclusions,” says Miller. “I know what people want to hear when they ask questions like, ‘What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever talked about?’ … They want the really outrageous crazy story. They want the really extremely disgusting horrible stuff. [These men] are paying me three dollars a minute, but I love them.”
• The Vancouver Fringe Festival runs from Thursday Sept. 10 to Sunday Sept. 20. Tickets and schedule at VancouverFringe.com
