Mardi Gras cruising

Kevin McGreal’s circles of friends are providing him with the most valuable inspiration and research for the plays he writes.

Shakespeare’s Boys , a tale of Melbourne rent boys which featured during last year’s Mardi Gras, was written by McGreal after he discovered one of his friends was working as a rent boy on the streets of St Kilda.

For this year’s Mardi Gras, McGreal has written Cruising , a play about a casual pick-up between a schoolteacher and a closeted soap star.

This play is based on the real-life encounter of another of McGreal’s friends who was cruising a Melbourne beat and had had sex with a former TV star and internationally successful actor.

When I found out who it was, it really shocked me and was totally unexpected, McGreal says, while refusing to reveal the identity of the star in question. I thought the situation was actually quite comical and that’s where the idea for the play came from.

Cruising tells of the date-from-hell encounter between schoolteacher Brad and soap star Tom, who meet online and then head off for a date in Brad’s car. When the car breaks down outside a popular beat, the strained situation between the men goes from bad to hilariously worse.

McGreal also stars in the show as Tom, with comedian Chris Molyneaux playing Brad.

To say Cruising is an intimate theatrical venture is something of an understatement. The play is staged in a car parked at Salt Clinic, with the actors performing the drama in the front seat while the audience sits in the back.

Each performance lasts for only 25 minutes, and there are four performances per night during its season.

While the Sydney production is being staged within the Salt Clinic, the recent Melbourne production was staged in the busy carpark behind the Coles supermarket in Prahran.

That has been quite interesting as we have been doing the play inside the car while people were walking past with their groceries in the trolleys, looking in and wondering what on earth was going on, he laughs.

But I wanted to do something intimate, which is my reaction to the contemporary entertainment with the mega-musicals, mega-shows and mega-screens -“ everything huge.

This is very much a fly-on-the-wall performance piece, and I wanted it to challenge the relationship an audience has with the show.

And it is an intimate show in the true meaning, not one of those intimate and live shows in front of only a few thousand people.

McGreal says he was so inspired by the audience’s response to last year’s Shakespeare’s Boys that he made the decision to return to Sydney for the next few seasons of Mardi Gras.

I am going to make this a tradition as Mardi Gras is again just too good to miss, he says. I love Mardi Gras again and it is like it has a new breath of life and reminds me of those great days in the 1990s when people were so enthusiastic.

Well, that is what I saw again last year and so you’ll see me back with shows for the next few years at least.

Cruising plays 22 February to 2 March, with four performances per night, at Salt Clinic in Bourke St, Darlinghurst. Bookings at [email protected].