Summer is a great time to dive into things you’re curious about, swim around for a bit and then either develop a passion or hop out of the pool with nothing worse than sunburn and wrinkly fingers, right? Cue the “It Comes Naturally” short play festival.

The festival will feature twenty original scripts, all written by Beijingers about relationships that are entangled with issues of “normalization, empowerment and limitlessness.” They’ll be performed on rotation over two weekends from August 4-14 at Penghao Theater, with Beijing residents as actors, directors and writers, from students to stockbrokers, from China to Venezuela.

Being a bit of a theater nut and having directed and acted in a few plays before, I bounced–quite literally, actually, because yoga balls have replaced a few of the chairs in the office–at the opportunity to meet some theater-loving folk and explore the amateur theater scene here in Beijing. I agreed to participate immediately, blindly trusting that I would love the scripts.

When the scripts came along from festival producer Gabriel Rodriguez-Rico, I realized they almost all featured gay or lesbian relationships. Fitting, I thought, given the recent coverage of LGBT relationships in Beijing. They ranged from the comic (aided by a troublemaking leopard-print thong as a prop) to the bittersweet (a computer nerd who arranges for the man he’s in love with to date another) to the tragic (where coming out doesn’t go so well).
At first, as a heterosexual, I was worried my directing would not do the plays justice. I like it when theater is honest, and how honest could I be about relationships I never had?

Luckily, the last script I read I took to immediately. It’s about a pair of roommates (who, quite shockingly, had the exact same names as my roommates), one a party girl who loves shoes and shopping and the other a tomboy who just dumped her girlfriend for pressuring her to be more feminine. Both are equally valid, sassy and interesting explorations of what it means to be a woman. This play called up questions I imagine any woman – irregardless of sexuality  – asks herself: Can I act like a ditz and still be a feminist? Can I reject motherhood and fashion and still be seen as a woman?

“The theatre scene is pretty safe and diverse in Beijing. If there’s a place to do it without fear, it is definitely here. We are building a ship, and we’re all in this together,” says Gabriel. I liked the sound of that, minus the bit where it sounds like High School Musical.

So far, getting everything together has been tough. One of my actors dropped out in the first week because she had just taken on a new job, and scheduling between three very busy people is always hard. But in the end, I'm glad I met such creative and welcoming people, learned a little bit about amateur theater and gave my directing muscles a bit of a stretch. After all, it takes diving into something to realize how great it is to be able to dive at all.

For those who’d like to get involved, the festival’s still in need of crew members, performers, and of course, (shameless plug) audience members.

If you want to get involved in any of the plays then email itcomesnaturally2011@gmail.com. Break a leg.
 

Photo: Gabriel Rodriguez-Rico