Tell us about your show Cowboys and Lesbians.
Cowboys and Lesbians is the little nerdy gay child of my heart! It’s a queer rom-com about two teenage best friends, Nina and Noa, who start writing a sexy cowboy film together, and may or may not figure out they fancy each other in the process…
What inspired the show?
I spent a lot of time as a teenager making fun of films about teenagers – like a lot of people didn’t feel represented by any of them. This play is inspired by the incredibly fun conversations my schoolfriends and I would have in which we would parody all these teen tropes.
How did you choose which romantic tropes to play with in this show?
Though this wasn’t a conscious decision at the time.
Looking back, I can see that the tropes I was most interested to tease were the ones that had most affected my romantic life, and, sadly, also my character development! So many audience members came up to us in Edinburgh saying things like “Carter [the parody troubled sexy cowboy in the play] is my exact type!” – so I really don’t think I’m alone in this!
What was your process like for inverting those tropes?
The most important thing was the getting our stock characters right. Once we had them, the story really flowed from there, and the trope-inversions just wrote themselves!
What do you think makes shows like this so important to LGBTQ+ culture?
My honest answer is that I think it’s really important to be able to have a laugh at yourself. As a queer person so much of the content out there that’s supposedly ‘about you’ is actually not for you at all – it’s educationally designed with other people in mind, and can skew quite sanctimonious. I wanted to provide a bit of an antidote to that!
How do you feel about the reception the show got at the Fringe?
I couldn’t be happier. I got to meet so many incredible queer people from all over the world, and have so many moving conversations with people about how seen they felt.
One man, who was all the way over from Texas, came up and told me he had brought his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s mum, and then he bought copies for the rest of his extended family. A lot of Americans loved it, actually, which I was pretty surprised about. Apparently they found the parody scenes quite accurate…
How are you feeling about bringing the show to The Park Theatre in London?
I am very very nervous! This is the first time I feel like our show has a reputation to live up to!
But, equally, there are so many thrilling things are going on that it’s hard not to be excited. At the moment, our amazing set designer Esme Solomon is building the set in the evenings after our days of rehearsal – so every morning we come in and more of it is up. It’s looking so amazing already – sort of like the treehouse you imagined you could build for yourself as a child (or is that just me lol).
We’re also setting out a little Photo Booth area in the theatre bar with one of our painted backdrops from the Fringe. It’s going to be kitted out with cowboys hats and various fun props. I am deeply excited to see all our audiences digging into that!
Cowboys and Lesbians is running at Park Theatre in London from 21st February to 9th March.
Find out more about their show and future dates by checking out their LinkTree.
