Theatre review: Log Boy
Anthony Nocera’s Log Boy is a manically beautiful fever dream that champions love, grief and the complexities of queerness across generations.
The opening night performance of playwright Anthony Nocera’s Log Boy was a boisterous joy to be privy to. This long-awaited, semi-autobiographical play revolves around a young man, also named Anthony, following the death of his fiancé Michael. On the eve of Michael’s funeral, the new “widow” retreats to their house in the hills joined by two of Michael’s oldest, dearest and most chaotically catty friends. Anthony must deal with a weekend of memories, secrets and harsh truths as old boxes are sifted through and the humanity behind the chaos of grief is explored – and all while being haunted by the spectre of a Leather Daddy.
The whole ensemble is stellar and perfectly weighted. Paul Capsis is joyously captivating as Justin, boomer queen of the sisters. Paul Reichstein walks the line of ambiguity perfectly as Jamie, a gay man who never thought he’d live long enough to have to live with himself and his decisions, whilst Anthony Nicola as Anthony brings a profoundly sincere grace to the heaviness that his character is mired in.
I didn’t expect a production called Log Boy to have such a deep-seated emotional resonance, but when Nocera yanks away the veil of our human presumptions about the above characters, we are left with a very raw and guttural reflection of the challenges that these different generations of the queer community went through. These moments are deftly written and wholly realised.
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Elena Carapetis as Anthony’s mum is a piercingly juxtaposing delight who helps ground all of the chaos as only a mother can (and occasionally contributes to it… as only a mother can.) Leather Daddy, played by Chris Asimos, is pervasively perverse in the most glorious way. With abs pumping and guns akimbo, Asimos steals the show whenever his scantily-clad, eternally grinding and aggressively tongue-in-cheek posturing enters the stage. The character is born of a fever-dream, acting almost as the internalisation of Anthony’s fears and worries, wearing assless chaps and nought but leather.
The director, Riley Sparado, has wrangled the pacing to perfection, perfectly timing the darker and heavier moments amongst the flurry of juicy dialogue. The humour is rife and ripe through the whole play, but it always has a rich vein of heart and soul pulsing underneath. As both writer and producer Anthony Nocera has done a glorious job making theatre that is this hilarious, and this heavy.
Spark, an initiative by State Theatre Company South Australia to help fund and support independently bold and daring theatre, has been an outrageous success so far. It has helped give us a night of theatre that fully immersed the senses and left one marvelling at the burgeoning generation of truth tellers being brewed here on Kaurna Yarta. The standing ovation was as sincere and powerful as the closing speech of Anthony Nocera. He gave an impassioned plea for more support and faith in the independent Adelaide theatre scene and a dedication to the man who inspired this play. Vale Jamie Anderson.
Raucously hilarious, deeply moving and disturbingly dark, this piece of theatre is a groundbreaking, heartfelt and homespun take on a journey through the beauty of love and the pain of its absence. A play about moving on together that leaves the senses wanting more and the spirit feeling seen.
Log Boy continues at AC Arts until October 10
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