On Heads and Hearts: New Aussie dramedy comes to the Cellar

By Jonah Dunch

I peek into the Cellar Theatre, where cast and crew are busy setting up for one of the final rehearsals of Younger and Smaller. They follow me back out of the Cellar’s black-walled, postered lobby and up the narrow concrete stairs to sit in a circle on the lawn. Actor Frank Yang is still wearing his head, and director James Mukheibir—despite the quick turnaround on this three-week production cycle—is managing not to lose his.

“As farcical and ridiculous as the play can seem, it is grounded in real experiences,” Mukheibir says, referencing the crucial first rehearsal, where he and the actors told each other the stories of their lives. “I wanted the actors to understand each other’s stories so that they could understand [from] what angle they were going to come at different moments in the show.”

Younger and Smaller, by emerging Australian playwright Amelia Newman, dramatizes snapshots of the lives of three young Aussies dealing with anxiety, the grief of losing a friend, and encounters with fuckboys and minor celebrities. Jack (played by Yang), Alanna (Audrey Bennett), and Elise (Sophie Morrisey) draw the audience into their living room and their emotional lives, all while wearing papier-mâché heads. A production by SUDS (the Sydney University Dramatic Society), the play is playing at the Cellar Theatre at 7:00 p.m. each night from 23rd to 26th October.

“It’ll be the slap in the face you need to get your life in order and then come see some more theatre,” Bennett says (half-facetiously) to sell the show. “It’s just a straight-up good time.”

Preparing to pitch for SUDS, Mukheibir was looking for shows about and for students, rather than about characters decades older than him and his peers. After googling buzzwords (“young people,” “theatre,” etc.), he stumbled across a review of Younger and Smaller’s debut at a “tiny little festival” in Melbourne. This single review was all he could find online about the show, so he emailed the production company, who sent him to the playwright, who—two weeks later—responded with a rough draft of the script. Mukheibir was blown away.

“The script represented a lot of the themes in the show that I was really interested in exploring. It showed young people in their varied, confusing selves,” Mukheibir says. “This show managed to combine so many different aspects, and so many different feelings and genres, into the one cohesive whole, and it somehow worked. And I just loved it.”

Seconding Mukheibir, Morrisey says the play paints a “whole picture” of the experiences of young people, rather than limiting its focus to one feeling or idea. It couples irreverence with an almost “embarrassing” profundity, belying the glamour of mass-media representations of young adult life.

“[It’s] like a revue written by people who didn’t know what a revue was… a revue about their lives,” Morrisey says.

Yang adds that he’s impressed with Younger and Smaller’s naturalistic dialogue. (He’s taken off his head at this point.)

“We’ll be saying lines, and I’ll forget that they’re lines from the play. And it’ll catch me off-guard,” Yang says. “The line is so good that it takes me out of the moment.”

Of course, this play’s naturalism ends where its oversized heads begin. According to Mukheibir, Australians like to sit at a “very fine middle ground” avoiding ostentatious celebration of good times and shying away from any indulgent glumness. The papier-mâché heads speak to the masks Australians put on to obscure their emotions in social situations. Indeed, the play is unapologetic in its Australianness, littered with Aussie pop-cultural references, though Mukheibir stresses that its honest portrayal of youth has a transnational appeal.

“It’s got that core of human experience that I think anyone will understand,” Mukheibir says.

I stop my recording and close my notebook. Mukheibir stands, and the actors redon their heads. I depart as they chat to each other—but if Yang is right about the dialogue, perhaps they’ve already begun to rehearse.