Face to Face

Playwright Emily Wells is a graduate of the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts and holds a Bachelor of Entertainment Industries from the Queensland University of Technology. Her experience as a producer and collaborator with First Nations creatives across Australia means she certainly knows how to tell a story and entertain an audience. Face to Face is her debut play. It premiered at Metro Arts in Brisbane for Playlab Theatre in 2022, but the piece has found a very welcome home at the Cremorne Theatre as part of QPAC’s Clancestry Festival, which celebrates our First Nations creative contributors. Face to Face is warm, witty, moving, and most of all engaging, with its sharp dialogue and empathetic characters. The play deals with a disconnection – with family, with community – and its central character, Leila, has left her home town somewhere in ‘Woop Woop’ in country Queensland to devote herself to her work with Black on Track, an Aboriginal activist group. The play’s themes come head to head when ‘Aunty Leila’ reconnects with her niece, Maddie, after a long time of family estrangement.

The two characters are played by shining lights in our First Nations creative talent pool. Queensland-born and Meanjin-based Shahnee Hunter plays Leila with exhausted, dry wit. Leila feels the weight of her responsibilities to make her work matter as she carries the torch for past generations. But she hasn’t lost any of her deadly humour. For this reason, Shahnee is perfect casting, seeing as the performer was given the Deadly Funny 2023 award as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She is a joy to watch from moment one as Leila returns home from work late, gasping for a cuppa tea, only to find the cupboard bare. You are totally on her side when she is confronted by the feisty Maddie, far from home, in trouble and frustrated by the lack of action on the Indigenous Rights front. What use is her Aunty’s policy papers and business lunches when Maddie herself can see instant action using her Tik Tok profile?

Maddie is usually played by Jazleen Latrise (seen recently in Queensland Theatre’s The Sunshine Club and Othello) but for the performance I saw on 10 November, it was Perry Mooney (Meanjin-based actor and model familiar from ABC TV’s Gold Diggers) who had stepped in at the last minute to take over the role in an emergency. And Perry did a brilliant job, even making you forget the fact that the lines were being read from a script for most of the 90-minute, one-act play. Perry has a natural and confident stage presence. It was exciting to witness these two talented performers in action, sparring through some very funny lines but ultimately moving the audience to tears as they confronted the reality of Maddie’s trip to see her Aunty. The recent referendum vote on a Voice to Parliament was deftly swerved at the start of the play, but the heartache of politics and the piles of paperwork that Leila must push to see Indigenous policy succeed for her community were omnipresence in an economical but clever set design.

Face to Face is the perfect one-act piece – entertaining and funny, but capable of delivering a serious message underneath the warmth and wit of its characters – and performed by engaging entertainers.

Find out more: www.qpac.com.au/event/fnfacetoface_23

Beth Keehn

Photos: Courtesy of QPAC