Jack McGee
Early on in Rebellina, Lesa MacLeod-Whiting professes that the “the vibe tonight, is silly.” She’s not lying. MacLeod-Whiting moves from joke to joke with manic enthusiasm. She swerves from embodying a “petulant Spanish prince-ling”, into jokes about the need for better representation of women keeping secret families, “how can she be it, if she can’t see it?”. She’s so light on her feet that she’s no longer touching the ground.
The bait here, is that “the vibe tonight, is silly” does not mean that Rebellina is not a wildly intelligent show, that treats its audiences as adults, and feels, for the lack of a better word, smart. The idea that silly and smart should in any way be mutually exclusive of one another is shattered by Macleod-Whiting. Jokes about the Bayeux tapestry and awkwardly fumbling for the seam in your yoga pants can exist side by side in harmony. Observed in close proximity, they don’t look that different from each other.
In an interview with The Post Macleod-Whiting shares a piece of advice she got from Australian comic Felicity Ward “(she)... told me ‘Never settle for lazy punchlines’ always write 10 more options than you think you need for a joke because if you force your brain to stretch that far, it’ll come up with something truly weird and unique.” Based on Rebellina, I think this process has the opposite effect of what you might expect. My assumption would be that the 10th, 11th, 12th, punchline would be a non sequitur. It would be random, grasping at straws. Instead, I think it winds up being more specific. It’s personal, not in the sense that I think Macleod-Whiting is sharing secret truths or baggage with us, but because its ideas could only come from her psyche. Rebellina feels like a show where all of the ways we commonly would talk about a subject have been drilled right past, leaving us with Macleod-Whitings untempered worldview.
The result is a show happy to dwell on art history and feminist translation theory. It makes niche biblical references, goes into Freud’s Madonna-Mistress complex, and trades in specific yoga poses. It is not, despite how it might sound, a show made exclusively for the university educated Wellington liberal elite. This is for two reasons. Firstly, “the vibe tonight, is silly”. Every high-minded idea is laced with immaturity. When Macleod-Whiting brings up the Bayeurx tapestry, she’s referencing the number of penises depicted on it (It’s 93. There are only three women included, for point of comparison). The separation between “high-brow” and “low-brow” can be less than a punctuation mark.
The second reason I believe Rebellina is accessible, is down to Macleod-Whiting’s craft. I did not know what the Bayeurx tapestry was until I googled it, but I was given all the context I needed to feel like I knew. Macleod-Whiting pulls off the magic trick of making you feel like you’re really smart, even if the totality of your knowledge of the subject is a hazy memory of a Wikipedia article. She contextualises her jokes quietly, so that the show rarely feels like a lecture, and when she does pivot into an academic word dump, it’s a joke at her expense, distracting from the colloquial setup work she’s doing around it.
I will note, that Rebellina does not feel like a show with a meaningful arc or build. There are heartfelt stories about Macleod-Whiting’s daughter gently threaded through the show, but they aren’t a thematic backbone - nor do we need them to be. The work is so consistent and regularly unexpected that I am not left wanting for more, although mileage may vary.
As an audience member, I feel both supported and trusted by her. She gives me just enough to understand a joke, and assumes that I’m intelligent enough to put it together. It’s the kind of show where I, alongside much of the audience, are often late to laugh. We’re still catching up to Whiting a few seconds after the ball has dropped and it’s such a delight to be allowed to do that. Rebellina sets a new bar for local artists. It reminds us that there is no content that can’t be made accessible or funny, the only barrier is your ability to communicate it. Of course, this assumes that any of us have as much to say or remotely as much talent in saying it as Macleod-Whiting. As of now, I’m unconvinced.
 | Jack McGee is a Te-Whanganui-a-Tara based playwright and theatre maker. Some of his notable works include Boys and the Silent School Disco, Edit the Sad Parts, and Music Sounds Better Out Here. He works regularly with Squash Co. Arts Collective where he is a co-director. He is in no way related to Greg McGee. |