Syd Campbell and Elena Eli Belyea in Gender? I Hardly Know Them, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Nico Humby

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

As their own song goes (you’ll have to imagine the ukulele accompaniment and the cheery tone), “Alberta’s tough for prairie queers.”

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

But somehow, amazingly, they haven’t let this place, harsh, marginalizing, and right-sliding as it can be, get them down. I caught up with Gender? I Hardly Know Them onstage on opening night of this year’s Expanse Fest in the new updated edition that’s been on a cross-country tour. The queer sketch comedy duo, Elena Eli Belyea and Syd Campbell (joined for the occasion by musician Miranda Martini), have an unsquelchable sense of absurdity and mischief, witness this very funny, playful, and welcoming show.

And, as you might expect from their duo name, Belyea and Campbell, charming and infinitely likeable performers with a goofball streak, have something to say about gender, its orthodoxies and its assumptions. “Gender is dead. Welcome to the funeral!” 

In one of the personal monologues about growing up Albertan that weave between the sketches and change your viewing angle, Belyea (they/she) says, “my gender is fluid. It dances around.” If every other aspect of yourself can evolve, why not that? she argues.   

And the pair have something to say — something serious, delivered with a light touch — about pronouns and what heft pronouns have in the universal self-discovery quest. Campbell auditioned theirs, on their cat Lola first, they report.

The Tiny Bear Jaws show, directed by Paul Blinov (who’s done some of the sketch writing), is a highly unusual combination of sketch comedy and reflective monologues that come at us directly. We meet a series of vivid prairie characters. The banker at Pride flogging her ‘woke’ credentials to sign people up for rainbow-coloured credit cards. Or Stan and Greg, a couple of prairie dudes who have a deeply buried subterranean attraction to each other. Belyea and Campbell imagine subtext come to life, as one admits to “fearing an actual moment of intimacy and vulnerability….” Before they go back to cracking a beer and being laconic. 

The monologues aren’t a catalogue of trauma and oppression. There are parents who really try to adjust their pronoun habits. There are hetero friends who come to the rescue in fraught moments. These are satirists at work, true, with a lot of material to work with, but there’s a warmth about them. In its way Gender? We Hardly Know Them is all about liberation, about freeing yourself to discover your own identity and letting it change, while doing six jobs and trying to find love.    

One of the many theatrical astute things about Gender? I Hardly Knew Them, as this edition demonstrates under Blinov’s direction, is the way Belyea and Campbell exit from a sketch, or wander off from a monologue. They don’t insist on being conclusive, and nailing down the lid to prove a point. In that respect, the show reminds me a bit of the ‘Talk of the Town’ short bits in The New Yorker. And that sits well in a show that’s all about not being prescriptive — either for yourself or other people.

Breathe, people, breathe.

Gender? I Hardly Know Them has two more performances at Expanse, tonight (March 25) Saturday and Saturday April 1. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca