Perth Voice Interactive

ABORIGINALITY, homosexuality and family angst come together in the classic indigenous play What Do They Call Me? at the Blue Room.

Written by Eva Johnson more than 25 years ago the themes still resonate, director Eva Grace Mullaley says.

“I read this play about 12 years ago…[and] haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It’s a great piece and so well written.”

The 33-year-old started out as an actor but kept wanting to tell the director how to do the job, so enrolled at WAAPA. This is Mullaley’s first solo role as producer and director, although she’s shared the roles in a number of WAAPA and Yirra Yaakin shows.

Raised by her white mother she says she can’t claim to identify as part of the stolen generation, but “the play is about identity and being removed from your culture — something I can relate to”.

Playwright Johnson played the roles of the three wildly diverse women herself but in its WA debut three actors, Ebony McGuire, Amy Smith and Alyssa Thompson will take on the roles of a mother and her two daughters who reveal how they come to find each other, their culture and themselves.

Connie Brumbie is an archetypal  powerful Aboriginal mother-figure who is larger than life and has lived through some tough periods.

Regina is a professional woman with a husband and children. Raised by adoptive parents who resisted her efforts to find her birth mother, she has been “wrapped in a blanket of whiteness” and is unaware of her Aboriginality, thinking she is Eurasian.

Alison is a feisty lesbian and vastly different from her sister. She struggles with her white partner’s perceptions of her heritage and how her culture affects her sexuality.

What Do They Call Me? is on at Northbridge’s Blue Room Theatre till September 27. Tix $15–$25 at blueroom.org.au

by JENNY D’ANGER