Below is a guest post from Rebecca Rose Vassy, a performer in the new play Fiveplay.
If someone asked you to picture Washington, DC and name the first things that spring to mind, it’s likely that polyamory, queerness, or theater wouldn’t even make the top 10. But all three of those things have vibrant, sprawling communities here in the capital region, and on April 8th they intersect in the opening night performance of The Coil Project’s newest production, Fiveplay, written by playwright Erica Smith and directed by Sean Butler.
Fiveplay centers on the residents of Venn House, including a nesting polycule of five people in a constellation of dating and marriage relationships with each other, plus a sixth housemate who isn’t involved with any of the others but is part of the family-of-choice. It was inspired by producer Rebecca Fischler’s previous living situation, taking it out of the realm of the “polyamorous commune with everyone I love” fantasies shared by so many of us ethical nonmonogamous (ENM) folk and fixing it in lived experience.
Monty (Michael Silver), the house project manager, is married to perpetually-deadpan Sawyer (Eric Jones). Sawyer’s dating cantankerous workaholic Emerson (me—Rebecca Rose Vassy), who’s married to sweet “house mom” Avery (Christine Smith), who’s dating horny polyamory newbie Ray (Brianna Goode), who’s also dating Monty. (As Monty says in the play, “It’s a lot—you’ll get it.”)
Self-exiled rich kid Keegan (Rocky Nunzio), their housemate, learns of a personal tragedy early in the play as the household finalizes plans for their upcoming annual F***sgiving celebration—a day of celebrating what everyone does and does not give f***s about, dressing to express, sharing a sort of Franken-potluck of everyone’s signature dishes, and some actual giving of f***s as the piece de resistance. The play unfolds around the polycule’s various attempts to support Keegan while facing some of the relationship challenges that come from multiple loves and building a life together.
At its heart, Fiveplay is a slice-of-life comedy where the life just happens to be well outside the mainstream. Don’t expect overwrought drama about jealous fits and STI scares—Smith wrote most of the play in conjunction with the cast and director, several of whom are actually queer and polyamorous, in order to capture the joy, coziness, mutual support, and very human reality of the lives we live and observe in our community. In many respects, Fiveplay carries on the philosophy of Schitt’s Creek, when Dan Levy explained that one of his goals was to depict a world where homophobia simply doesn’t factor into anything. Similarly, the play lets us see what it looks like when a polyamorous family can simply BE.
Not all is rainbows and unicorns, however. There are real conflicts threaded through the events of Fiveplay. Laughter yields now and then to heartbreak, generational trauma, anxiety, and even loneliness. But the heart of Venn House beats strong, and tension inevitably dissolves in the gentle teasing and silliness with which any lovers or friends would comfort each other.
There’s a magical realism quality to the script, with characters stepping in and out of flashback, taking on hallucinatory roles, and even breaking the fourth wall to give the non-ENM audience a bit of Polyamory 101. There’s a brief side story about a haunted music box that was previewed in the Coil’s fall anthology show, Strange Tales. Director Sean Butler has worked with the cast to ensure that the set and costumes reflect the larger Venn diagram of so many polyamorous folks who are frequently also Renn Faire-goers, gamers, burners, Pagans, and overall geeks. (There are even a few small visual “if you know, you know” jokes for the ENM people in the audience!)
The queerness of the script is a little bit incidental, though probably inevitable—Smith created all the characters without specified gender so that they could be cast in any combination. Given the completed circuit of the relationships, it would’ve been hard not to have any of the pairings end up queer, but with the current casting, everyone is dating multiple genders—including the fact that Sawyer is non-binary. The result is more “this is what it looks like when people just love who they love” rather than any real commentary on sexual orientation and identity, but hey, we can hope that maybe we’ll get a sequel play (Sixplay?) where Avery, Emerson, and Ray dish about the lack of queer women’s spaces and bi erasure, and Monty and Sawyer gossip about their Capital Pride party planning committee while swiping on Tinder together.
Like so many live shows, Fiveplay has been two years in the making—it was two weeks from opening in March 2020 when the world shut down and we were forced to cancel. The new production required re-casting half the show and replacing most of the crew. We’ll be performing in a theater that requires masking and proof of vaccination now. We’ve remarked amongst ourselves that this almost feels like a period piece at this point, with the Venn House residents constantly out of the house (gasp) and not wearing masks (GASP). But for those of us who’ve been involved since the beginning, it’s beyond exciting to finally see this play that we’ve lived with for two years come to life. Speaking for myself as a queer polyamorous person, representation is absolutely worth the wait.
Fiveplay opens April 8th, 2022 and runs 8 PM Fridays and Saturdays through April 23rd at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop’s black box theater. Tickets are available on the Coil Project website.
About the author: Rebecca Rose Vassy is a writer and sex educator working with The Pincus Center for Inclusive Treatment & Education in the Washington, D.C. area. As her alter ego Diva Darling, she is a burlesque performer and teacher as well as the femme-cee and producer of Smut Slam DC (a branch of Smut Slam International), a monthly open mic storytelling show that’s all about sex. Her first urban fantasy novel, MetamorphosUS, came out last year, and she’s a theater veteran as an actor, playwright, and producer including the creation of her Capital Fringe hit burlesque musical Tiresias’ Tits. https://divanations.com