As Bees in Honey Drown

by Douglas Carter Beane

featuring:
Lucy Miller,
Garth Holcombe,
James Lugton,
Berynn Schwerdt,
Annaliese Szota,
Emma Wood

Directed by James Beach

Set & Costume Design: James Browne
Lighting Design: Sophie Kurylowicz
Sound Design: Caitlin Porter
Production Manager: Micah Johnson
Stage Manager: Heidi Lupprian
Producer: Anna Sampson for Darlinghurst Theatre as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, February 6 to March 7, 2009.

"the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life."

Oscar Wilde said that. I say it too.

Douglas Carter Beane has given us a new take on timeless themes, allowing the creative people listed here the licence to explore how and where our practical circumstances and inventive spirits inform, challenge, inspire and amuse each other.

I was born just days before the brave hearts of the first Sydney Mardi Gras were arrested for their criminal yearnings and so it is with a mixture of immense pride and thankless impatience that I present work for Mardi Gras Festival. While a comedy, this play has nurtured rogue thinking that has long accompanied any idea of sexuality I personally entertain: without eschewing sexual identity, mightn't we harbour a romantic identity, which the world in its cynicism ignores? Politics aside, is Gay/Straight in the end more important than True/Free?

With urbandictionary.com offering such tongue-where-it-ought-to-be labels as homoflexible and heterogenerous, might we not soon find the rainbow has yet more colours to it?

But enough with the soapbox, already.

It is with joie de vivre and a dry wit that we present tonight's performance.