Under the NEON Light

Coral Drouyn talks to actress Kasia Kaczmarek about Elbow Room’s new play – the final offering from NEON this season.

When the Melbourne Theatre Company launched its NEON season some three years ago, we all wondered what kind of fresh and experimental theatre we could expect. Certainly it’s been a wild and undulating ride – but we have come to expect the unexpected. The last Neon offering for 2015 is no exception. Produced by highly acclaimed independent and experimental theatre company Elbow Room, We Get It promises to be thought-provoking and highly entertaining.

We so often take for granted the great female roles in theatre, and give little thought to gender assignment. Would we, for example, think Lady Macbeth was monstrous or merely ambitious if she were a man instead of a woman? Are there great female roles, or merely male roles assigned to females? How does the writer define the gender of a character? We know, for example, that Sigourney Weaver’s character in of Ripley in Alien was originally conceived as male, but does it become female just because a woman is playing it? We also know that you can’t simply give the role of King Lear to an actress and change it to Queen Lear…. a mother’s relationship with her daughters is totally different to a father’s. These are fascinating topics for discussion – and from them (and others) has come a workshop resulting in the play We Get It.

Who are these heroines of classic theatre? Where do they really come from? What do they want from us? And what, in our weird and wired world, do we demand of them - and from the people tasked with bringing them to life for our entertainment?

“What we see on stage, what we ask from a performer, from a night out, has so much built in to it that’s unspoken,” says artistic director Marcel Dorney. “We identified a group of extraordinary women, brought them together in a room, and asked them ‘what is demanded of you, in your work, in your lives, that no-one really wants to talk about?’  The title of the show is something that I’ve said, too,” Dorney adds. “I said it because I assumed I knew more than I did.”

And so the actors are also the creators, though Rachel Perks and Daniel Evans had already mapped out a blueprint to work from. What kind of actors are willing to explore not only the characters they play, but their own persona whilst playing her?

Kasia Kaczmarek, an actress of wide experience who has been seen on our small screens in such shows as Wentworth, as well as appearing with Red Stitch and other prestigious theatre companies across the country, talks about her own journey as an actor. Born in Poland to two prominent actors, she and her parents emigrated to Perth when she was two and that’s where she was brought up.

“When you have actors as parents there is always drama in the house, and so you don’t know any different. What seemed really odd to me was what was “normal” to everybody else. School didn’t seem to have structure – I kept waiting for the curtain to fall, for all of us to have an interval, but the huge ‘moments’ – the dramatic highs – were few and far between. I just didn’t know any different.”

Kasia concedes that she never truly thought of being anything else but an actor, and there were distinct advantages. “Both my parents are quite brilliant – and that helped,” she says. Kasia’s mother, Marta Kazmareck, is a multi award winning actress who was part of the award winning ensemble of ABC’s hit series Rake and won international acclaim in the multi award winning SBS series The Circuit. Her father Kristof runs his own theatre company but is a familiar face on our big and small screens.

“I had an agent while I was still a child. I was multi-lingual (we spoke German at home) and my parents were really resourceful. I was encouraged to follow them. No-one ever suggested I should get a “real” job.”

But if there were advantages, there was also a downside.

“Because they are so good at what they do, I never knew that blind support that young actors get from families. You know, when doting Mums tell you ‘You were brilliant’ even when you suck, because they really don’t know the difference. They viewed every performance of mine with a professional eye and gave constructive criticism. It was quite brilliant to have two such great fulltime acting coaches in the family, but it did take me longer to discover my own voice, and my own process. I went to study in New York, and for the first time I had to trust my own instincts completely. It was hard, but necessary.”

And is We Get It, a step further in the process?

“Absolutely,” Kasia says. “As actors we all want to work – and get paid for it – but part of that is understanding that we have to bring so much of ourselves to that process. When you look at the great female characters in Drama, most of them have been created by men, and moulded to fit into neat archetypical boxes. But who are these women? What makes them so powerful.”

It’s those questions that We Get It seeks to answer. Those, and why these iconic characters haunt our dreams and colour our nightmares. Because we really DON’T ‘get it’ most of the time…we get the playwright’s voice and the actor’s…but now we have a chance to see onstage a group of actresses explore the process of inhabiting the skin of someone totally unlike themselves…or perhaps more alike than they care to admit. This fascinating play turns gender anxiety on its head in a witty and playful evening that pitches five ‘re-imagined’ classics against each other, in a battle to show us as we are now. Because that’s what we want, isn’t it...?

We Get It runs at The Lawler, MTC Southbank Theatre from 9^th-19^th July, 2015.