, who returns to Inner Mongolia for a funeral.){kind=link}
★★★
Be Gay For God’s Sake follows a theatre practitioner, Shasha (Shanshan Wu), who returns to Inner Mongolia for a funeral, staying with her mother Lin Song (Haoyu Wang). There, she reveals to her mother that she is a lesbian and is in a relationship. We travel into the past to find the source of Shasha’s and Lin Song’s relationship to queerness through the narration of God (Wu, Tianxin Tian and Hector T.J. Huang). From there, the audience is brought on the journey of self-discovery, loss and love, showcasing how time is never really chronological when it comes to knowing who you are. The play was developed and performed by the creative team Wang, Tian, and Huang, with Wu on board as performer and movement director.
The play aims to tackle queerness and the intersection of cultural identity by looking at how queerness interacts with the reality of living in Inner Mongolia. Lin Song takes on the typical character of the overbearing mother wanting her daughter to get married as soon as possible. Shasha lives in London and is well acquainted with modern life, hiding her relationship from her mother whilst pursuing a career in the theatre. Lin Song acts shocked by Shasha’s sexual orientation, but the clock is turned back in time. We begin to find out that perhaps Lin Song is not so different from Shasha after all.
As the play continues, we are introduced to Hu Yi (Tian), Shasha’s primary school teacher, who befriends Lin Song, and they become closer and closer, blurring the lines between friends and lovers. Meanwhile, we are introduced to Mrs Lien (Huang), another teacher and overzealous, strict Christian woman with a gay son and abusive husband. Mrs Lien is a strong believer in praying the gay away, turning to the church to testify about how God will save her family. Her character, though comical, reveals a tragic truth about how queerness and religion are often in conflict with one another. Well performed by Huang, Mrs Lien serves as an allegory for what happens when people try to “pray the gay away”. One of the most compelling parts of the play are the three Gods who analyse the characters as the story progresses. They become the audience’s guide to understanding what is going through the characters’ heads and what makes the situation so complicated: do you follow your heart or do you follow your duty? By allowing us to travel through time, we begin to understand why Lin Song didn’t take a chance on her own gay awakening and why Shasha did.
It’s heart-breaking to see Lin Song choose not to take a chance on love, instead being bound by societal expectations of being a good mother and wife, and deferring to a heterosexual world. The performance could easily have ended on a sad note, but instead chooses something much more upbeat and hopeful.
Be Gay For God’s Sake will be performed at Theatre Deli on 14, 15, 21 and 22 November as part of Voila! Theatre Festival.
Words by Ayomide Asani
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