For Both Resting and Breeding: cookies and couture
17 Jan 2025 - Photos by Dahlia Katz

The owners of the beautifully renovated house where For Both Resting and Breeding takes place, may not care to have their gleaming kitchen referred to as a recreation of "the last standing house from 1999." It won't be the last anachronism of the evening, as a work crew—a project manager, a historian, two volunteers and an engineer—attempts to create a Millennial Museum to celebrate the sesquicentennial of The Great Transition. We are in the future, sometime after 2148, where the burden of reproduction has become an "external process," freeing people from gender roles. Everyone is now an "ish" and lives a sexless life. Not surprisingly, all of the crew have a great curiosity about the past—only one volunteer, Alexander Thomas (Between Riverside and Crazy, The Royale) has any memory of the time before—but all also have ulterior motives. The future is not as utopian as it initially appears. But then, neither was 1999, and a great deal of the humour in For Both Resting and Breeding comes as the crew attempt to piece together, let alone understand, what the artifacts and motivations of the millennials mean.

We don't see the outside world or even get a solid sense of what the future is like, aside from a lurking suspicion that it is more repressive than as liberated, and idyllic, as the uptight and harried project manager, Maja Ardal (As You Like It) who also directs, insists. Playwright Adam Meisner teases out the details so that we sense what these particular ishes lives are like. To reveal more would be spoilers and ruin the fun of puzzling it all together, but the uniform coveralls and toque-like headpieces are a good clue. As is the choreographed inhale then exhale meditative exercise the crew uses whenever emotions surface. The crew is also enlisted to play characters in the museum, and the ulterior motives quickly come into play at an almost farcical pace. Thomas in particular gets to lean into the questions of gender as he becomes enamoured with recreating a fabulous gown and with the role, a great sight gag, he chooses to play. The look on the face of volunteer Jamie McRoberts (The Wizard of Oz) when she is shown a pair of silver slingbacks with heels is priceless. The comedy of learning to walk in them is uproarious.

The shoes become an important symbol and as McRoberts openly wonders what it is like to be a girl, and later a woman, gender roles are mocked but also oddly celebrated. The object of her desire, quite understandably, is the handsome historian ish Richard Lam (Every Little Nookie, Alice in Wonderland, Lulu v7: Aspects of a Femme Fatale, Hello Again, Peter Pan, Heart of Steel) who is fascinated with the concept of family units. Lam expertly, continuously, plays at least two contrasting emotional states at once, a cool robotic exterior that seethes underneath, triggering a similar but more expressive seething from McRoberts. For Both Resting and Breeding briefly elides into a charmingly bizarre rom com with all the emotional hesitancy and catharsis the genre elicits. Amy Keating (The Flick, Hand to God) is the no-nonsense engineer who then moves hilariously into her chosen role, a delicious bit of satire, before teaming with Thomas for a heartbreaking and heartwarming demonstration of just what the ishes have been missing. All of the performances are a delicate balance of ish conformity and emotionlessness draped over a striving humanity. All are richly comic until they become emotionally devastating.

The performances and staging have to be flawless as the presenting company, Talk is Free Theatre, specializes in unconventional theatrical spaces. In this case, the audience replaces a dining area and the action takes place in the open concept kitchen, the little space left in the dining area, and between the rows of seats. It is very intimate, we are so close to the actors that the slightest break in character or concentration would be painfully obvious. There were none. Instead one believes in the characters, only occasionally stepping outside of the spell to remark to oneself how flawless they are or to examine closely their intensity. Being inches from Lam's seductive eyes and McRobert's breathless and barely contained reaction is a rare experience. For Both Resting and Breeding would undoubtedly work as a proscenium presentation but placing us within the process of creating the museum creates a startling identification. Almost too close for comfort, both physically and emotionally, which is helpful in a science fiction context where genderless beings are discovering the gender roles we are being asked to question. 

The transition to ishdom is referred to as The Great Erasure and the very word 'transition' is problematic. Fortunately For Both Resting and Breeding is not questioning the value of non-binary or even the enforcement of non-binary, it is questioning the division of gender roles and what enforces those. Tellingly, it is an ish in male guise who uses sexuality as research, and an ish in female guise who explores sexuality as an expression of passion. Two ishes in their genderless state strive for, and possibly achieve, a quite different and utopianly human way of relating. Using Thomas as a sight gag was initially off-putting until the ish, and the actor, slipped seamlessly into the character and revelled in the freedom of combining "cookies and couture" to transcend genderism and ageism,  And the sexuality that tripped up, or liberated, two other ishes. Ardel's ish is worried that exploring the past will damage the present but "the past is a guessing game" and impossible to resist. Their past is our near-past and while thought-provoking and satirical, For Both Resting and Breeding offers an intimate and uniquely comical exploration of just what existing in a millennial world might mean.