Every Little Nookie: an uproarious sex farce of queer ideas and ideals
29 Aug 2022

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by David Hou

There are few entertainments that are more charming than a sex farce. Where ribald gags and suggestive innuendoes mix with misunderstandings and escalate into breakneck libidinous laughter. If there is a touching sexual awakening, all the better. Every Little Nookie is, on the surface, an old-fashioned crowd pleaser. Artfully constructed, written and performed, the play zips along as a playful seduction. It is only after the lights go up that the true cleverness is revealed. Subversive cleverness. 

The most risqué elements of Every Little Nookie are its in-your-face marketing and matter-of-fact queerness. There is a fairly lengthy "Audience Alert" warning/enticing with full frontal nudity combined with coarse and suggestive language. The ushers wear "Love Is Love" t-shirts and "We Are Family" blares as we take our seats. Considering that this is a Tuesday afternoon matinee and I, no spring chicken myself, am one of the youngest audience members, it is a concern. I am also one of the few who is not half of what reads as a long term heterosexual couple. That turns out to be one of the points. Every Little Nookie never panders or preaches, our entry point may be through the experiences of a straight couple of a certain age, but the characters in their orbit are a sampling of the spectrum of sexualities.

Perhaps because Every Little Nookie is a sex farce, a little kink or deviance from the heteronormative is a spice instead of a poison or a problem. The couple we first meet are in a comfortable rut, she a retired editor who insists on grammatical correctness, he a businessman wedded to his firm. Their ongoing game of Scrabble leads to some fun wordplay, while also hinting at unspoken tensions. Their daughter is determinedly queer and, a victim of the gig economy, financially strapped. When the parents are away at the cottage, with the assistance of her chosen family of roommates - the lesbian lover, the lesbian lover's pansexual non-binary lover, and a sex worker - the daughter earns their rent by throwing swingers parties in the basement of the family home. This being a sex farce, the parents arrive home unexpectedly early into the midst of a pansexual orgy. Worlds collide and the plot is set in motion.

All of this went down well with the audience who had (mostly) struggled with the steep staircases of Stratford's Studio Theatre. While I find it delightful that non-monogamous and not necessarily heterosexual sex is apparently no longer shocking, it is also invigorating to find that it is to be laughed with instead of at. Playwright Sunny Drake (CHILD-ish, No Strings (Attached), X) invests a great humanity into each of the characters so that once we have identified with the parents and their dilemma, it is not a huge leap to explore other options. By the time the mother, a radiant Marion Adler, tosses off the evening's raunchiest and funniest one-liner, all my assumptions about a Stratford grey-haired audience being stodgy have been shattered. The gay agenda has been, for these two hours at least, accomplished.

And that isn't even the subversive aspect of Every Little Nookie. Yes, the mother's sexual liberation is beautifully accomplished, and the problems of the ostensibly already liberated are more tactical than due to oppression, the true villain turns out to be capitalism, in particular the real estate crisis. Khadijah Roberts-Abudullah is an unrepentant activist and has several speeches about inequality and a desire for a utopian existence. The lectures soar as light comedy without a trace of being strident. She also has two unseen nieces who are uproariously activist on their own. Drake crams in dozens of social issues and each is delivered as a calm truth just as the varieties of sexuality are a given. The leftist agenda is woven in seamlessly and never once disturbs the relentless flow of the plot and comedy.

It is a lot of ideas to juggle and it turns out that a frothy sex farce is the ideal medium to get them across. Director ted witzel (Lulu v7: Aspects of Femme Fatale, Mr Truth, The Marquise of O, All's Well That Ends Well, La Ronde) guides an intricate and speedy series of entrances, exits, jumps in time and place, into clockwork precision without losing the exuberance. The deceptively simple set by Michelle Tracey gives the intimate theatre a multitude of playing spaces, all of which are utilized. The choreography of the swingers party orgy is a visual feast as it burlesques our expectations and nudge nudge wink winks right to the edge of comic explicitness. This is greatly aided by the performances. Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (Trout Stanley, Towards Youth, Erased: Billy & Bayard, Boticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, Black Boys) is a dervish of playful sexuality, an androgynously dressed man-puppy who humps every leg in sight. Jackman-Torkoff has a gift for strenuous physical comedy and an abundance of charisma. That works in Jackman-Torkoff's favour when the plot turns and pathos is (briefly) required.

Yes, the second act takes a detour into soap opera and wish fulfillment. It is the only stumble as the tone of the tropes balance precariously between tragedy and camp. There are hints of old school afternoon sudsers organ cues, but the audience groans elicited could have been empathy for the characters' plights, or could have been eye rolls expressed. Until then Every Little Nookie has managed to be gently satirical while also genuinely engaging and endlessly amusing. Thankfully the footing is not lost, the telegraphed ending manages to be authentically moving despite being complete fantasy. Again, a share of the credit has to go to the performers. While Adler and Jackman-Torkoff dominate by sheer force of nerve and verve, there is also great comic work from patchouli-loving, obscene apron-wearing Robert King. Veronica Hortiguela and John Koensgen develop a sweet relationship built on economic theory, and Rose Tuong (Lulu v7: Aspects of a Femme Fatale, All's Well That End's Well) embodies the inverse of the mother's sexual awakening without being schematic.

The daughter's dilemma begins when she meets a straight man—with a kid—who is into the kink the mother is escaping: monogamy. The dreaded straight man (who is certainly initially detested by Jackman-Torkoff who gets off some zingers, verbally and twerkingly) is treated generously. There is much comedy and sympathy milked from the unseen child, but it requires great charm to make this schlub with his self-admitted bad jokes a viable option for a polyamorous semi-lesbian. Fortunately Richard Lam (Alice in Wonderland, Lulu v7: Aspects of a Femme Fatale, Hello Again, Peter Pan, Heart of Steel) is up to the task, and turns a lovable loser into a DILF despite the pedestrian quality of his sense of humour. It is that very quality that makes him endearing. Drake is playing with words and humour throughout. Puns abound, Adlar warns us that "the words that connect things are important," a poop joke opens the show, and the mother, daughter and lesbian lover are bound together as they struggle to learn Cantonese. 

Learning another language, learning to be funny, learning to appreciate someone else's sense of humour are all metaphors for learning to appreciate alternate aspects of sexuality and alternative political ideas. Concealing gloriously subversive ideas in a romp of a sex farce is clever, using words themselves as an allegory is breathtakingly sublime. Drake, witzel and company want the audience to feel our common humanity. We're all queer in our own way and with a little bit of mutual respect, everyone gets to be happy. And with Every Little Nookie we all get to laugh with our foibles while dreaming of a utopia.