Non-voting citizens please stand up

For every generational label -” Gen X, Gen Y -” there’s an advertising mogul trying to work out new ways to sell you stuff. For that reason, it is refreshing to find pieces like Citizenship, a work which speaks of the commonality of youth, which brought the same self-doubt and pimples to everyone.

Penned by gay playwright Mark Ravenhill, Citizenship follows the story of 16-year-old Tom as he embarks on a journey to understand his sexuality. Somewhere in the midst of kissing boys and girls and looking to fortune tellers for guid-ance Tom comes to the realisation that perhaps not everything is about sexuality and that what he is trying to understand is in fact much more complex.

Performed by the Australian Theatre for Young People, this isn’t a play for kids, assures its director, Lee Lewis.

We do have some younger audiences coming to see it but this is a production with a much wider scope. I think of anyone who’s ever had questions in their life about how you mess up half of your life and spend the rest of your life trying to fix it. And it’s really robust writing.
It’s not a play that was written for kids, but written for young actors, she explained to Sydney Star Observer.

It’s quite a fascinating play because he’s written about identity, but specifically about the evolution of sexual identity and what is the actual process of that for people who are 15 or 16 and how that can impact on the long term decisions they make as a result of that.

For Lee, part of the joy of working on a project like Citizenship came from the very fact that it attempts to defy cultural trends of talking down to teenagers and instead engages in some purposefully meaty conversations.

I think there’s a tendency at the moment to infantilise teenagers and in stopping them from having complex conversations we’re delaying those conversations. It’s not that they can’t happen, it’s just that we’re delaying them and saying -˜oh, you can only have them when you’re 18 or 19′ which delays that growing-up process and causes other much bigger problems which they then have to navigate.

We can make [sexuality] controversial, or you can be really smart about it and say it’s not controversial, that this is the conversation that actually needs to be had, in a complex way, rather than in a controversial way. And that was part of my reason for enjoying this play, it doesn’t infantilise the kids at all and in fact requires some very complex conversations.

info: Citizenship plays at the Australian Theatre Young People in Walsh Bay from February 4-14. Tickets:$10-$15. Bookings: Call 9251 3900 or email [email protected]. Citizenship is currently on at the ATYP.