Sit back and picture this

By Mina Savjak September 2002

Sit back and picture this: A prominent deaf actor starring in a play about drugs, body image and pornography.

Presented by Whoosh productions, Etta Jenks is currently showing at Darlinghurst Theatre in Sydney’s Kings Cross – an area that closely resembles the play’s setting.

The play is about an out of town actress who finds herself in the LA underworld of drugs and porn, where dealers, directors and gangsters circulate around each other in dangerous proximity.

Director and co founder of Woosh productions, Kim Hardwick, believes this brief description of the storyline may come across as simplistic, but she assures that Etta Jenks is a complicated play written with a degree of sophistication.

“What’s really interesting about Etta Jenks is that it allows you to form your own moral relationship with the play, as opposed to telling you how you should feel,” Hardwick said.

“It’s not the stereotypical play that deals with the dangers of the porn industry. It has a really dry dialogue and sense of humour… you can expect to see a cross between film noir and a David Lynch,” she added.

With a cast of 10 actors, Etta Jenks is considered to be a fairly large independent production. Playing Burt, the lead male character, is Sydney’s distinguished deaf actor Alex Jones. Jones is a graduate of Tisch School of the Arts in New York and specialises in both experimental and physical acting.

“I think the play is really a portrayal of what’s happening in the neighborhood, Kings Cross… after reading the script I thought it was interesting and challenging. It’s very rare that you see a deaf character in a play and initially I thought…grab it, DO IT!” Jones said.

Director Kim Hardwick said: “No one else in the entire cast signs, so it was actually a fabulous learning experience for us all.”

“Having somebody with impaired hearing makes you doubly aware that the connection which you need to make as actors needs to be absolutely truthful… you can’t just fob it off with some verbal fairy floss, it needs to be there very much in the moment,” she added.

Jones said that being the only deaf actor was a huge challenge but he believes it is not much different to living his everyday life, where he associates with “hearing people” all the time.

“Nobody signs so I lip-read. I’m teaching the cast but all they want to know is all the ‘dirty’ signs. It’s common, you cannot resist the fact that signs can be so visual so that’s why I’m teaching everyone the dirty signs,” he said.

“The biggest difficulty for me is missing out on jokes because I can’t hear. Seriously! I can’t understand when everyone talks in the dressing room so I have to nudge some people to fill me in,” he added. Actor Toni Poli who plays Ben (the porn director) in the play sees working with Alex as more of a readjustment than a challenge.

“It’s just different because if you’re like me you tend to fidget a lot and talk with your hand in front of your mouth, but if you do that with Alex he can’t read your lips, so you tend to forget about that,” he said.

“Everything else aside, he’s an extraordinary performer and a wonderful person to watch on stage,” Poli said.

Staging an independent theatre production is an enormous challenge due to the financial burden, but Hardwick says there is definitely a positive side. She views independent productions as “really fantastic” as they allow the director and producer to take on more risks in their work.

“We do want bums on seats but we’re not so dependent on the fact that we have just spent $60,000 on a set, as some major company would do, so this allows us a little more freedom in the choices we make,” Hardwick said.

Hardwick believes that the kind of theatre produced and the type of audience demographic attending the shows is very different to that of larger scale productions

. “It’s not necessarily people that can spend $60 to $70 on a ticket and just sit there, drink their champagne, watch it like a piece of television and not think anything of it. I personally feel we attract a much more intelligent audience,” she added.

According to its director, Etta Jenks is the kind of play that allows for no middle ground in its connection with the audience.

“It’s the kind of thing you’ll either really love, or the kind of thing you’ll really hate,” she said