A juicy watermelon is made to sound like cunnilingus while banana and rockmelon make a potent visual and aural connection. Director Sheridan Harbridge wryly recalls the early challenges of using fresh produce to simulate sex on stage: “How do you find a classy way to smack fruit together?”
In a new production of “apocalyptic romcom” 44 Sex Acts in One Week, written by playwright David Finnigan, the humble tomato makes its debut “to simulate the sound of a jade yoni egg going into my vagina”, reveals Rebecca Massey, who plays both sex coach author Malaine Gutierrez and Devil Wears Prada-style editor Irene Gamerman.
Using fruit on stage as a live radio play is “messy, so messy”, muses Harbridge. “How do you protect the actors and the audience from so much fruit and juice and stickiness? We’ve had to get a really good sound artist in to control the chaos. The traffic and placement of props has become more important than the dialogue.”
Centred in this den of steaminess, Emma Harvey plays clickbait blogger Celina Valderrama who, desperate to avoid being fired, offers to review and perform all the acts in Gutierrez’s new how-to sex manual. Lowbrow meets highbrow as an ecological crisis and a pandemic hit, presciently part of a script written well before Covid-19 emerged in the world’s consciousness.
Finnigan, who previously wrote the controversial stage and radio play Kill Climate Deniers, says of 44 Sex Acts and its satire of the wellness boom: “It’s an extremely smutty piece but it’s got a playful edge. There is a lot suggested and they’ve [Massey and Harbridge] found this brilliant technique that allows them to go big.”
The best-laid ambitions butted against coronavirus, however. Massey and Harbridge, who appeared together in Kill Climate Deniers at Griffin Theatre in 2018, had formed their own production company, Moonshine & Tits, later sensibly rebranded as Club House Productions, with the aim of mounting works that could respond quickly to the cultural and political zeitgeist.
When the pandemic closed theatres in 2020, they wanted to record Finnigan’s new script as a radio play, complete with foley and fruit-sex sound effects (Harbridge’s idea). Optimistically, 44 Sex Acts was shifted to the stage after Sydney theatres first reopened, with the fruit sounds to be made in front of audiences.
Then, the trouble started: a lockdown shuttered 44 Sex Acts at Belvoir St theatre after just three performances in December 2020. State border closures cancelled a Brisbane festival season at the Brisbane Powerhouse in September 2021. Likewise, the pandemic again struck out a planned return season for Belvoir’s Festival of Everything that same month.
The pair clung to their bananas and carried on. They programmed the play for Sydney festival in 2022 because they were “deranged by then”, says Harbridge, laughing. “Not from being wise, or resilient, it was just too late to turn back.” Massey recalls thinking: “Fuck this, we’ll go big.”
Finnigan has since tweaked the script, and the staging “this time is really using the space fully”, says Harbridge. Understudies are lined up in case any performers are forced to drop out, and there are unconfirmed plans to tour the work, where borders permit.
In a déjà vu piece of Covid-19 intimate bubble casting, Harvey’s blogger character Celina enlists a man, Alab Delusa, played by Harvey’s partner in real life, Matthew Hardie, to help perform the 44 sex acts, ranging from bondage and discipline to orgy participation.
This use of real-life acting partners as sex experimenters recalls the earlier production, when Harbridge herself played Celina, with Harbridge’s own partner, Michael Whalley, playing Alab Delusa (Whalley has since returned to Melbourne to continue playing Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child).
There is also a “B story” in the play involving mosquitoes and frogs, says Massey, which is going to be “looped” with sound effects of water. But the fruit is the real star: both on stage and in her own life, Massey walks around supermarkets “banging things and stroking them to see what sort of noise they make”.
Touch fruit, this new Sydney festival season will be the first time that playwright Finnigan has seen 44 Sex Acts in One Week performed on stage. This time last year he was stuck in London as international borders closed.
Finnigan still has his sights on lancing the US$1.5tn wellness market and on the “big boom of people seeking alternative sexuality resources” and the “whole lot of grifters who have moved in to sell everything you can think of with no qualification needed”.
“If you need a selenite cleansing disc for your jade yoni egg at a DIY vaginal steaming kiosk, you can get that at the drop of a hat,” he says.
“The wellness industry now has this frightening political edge to it. Perhaps it always had. These obsessions with getting back to ‘primitive humanity’, there’s a lot of stuff entailed in that.
“You get further into the world of these motivational sex gurus, who are teaching you how to ‘cure your cancer with mindful masturbation’.
“I don’t know what the ethics are there, but it seems questionable.”
44 Sex Acts in One Week is at the York theatre, Seymour Centre, from 12 to 16 January as part of Sydney festival
