Review: this is a choose-your-own review of Burgerz
Written by Travis Alabanza, directed by Kitan Petkovski, starring Kikki Temple
Review by Martha Latham
This is a positive review of Burgerz:
Burgerz had a lot of work to do to impress me: I don’t usually like one-person shows. I don’t usually like audience participation. I don’t usually like burgers.
I liked Burgerz.
Kikki, our lead, tells us someone threw a burger at her, in broad daylight, at Flinders Street station. Kikki uses this story to explore systemic violence through a series of metaphors. Burger metaphors.
Kikki is not alone. At the heart of the play is the interaction between Kikki and her selected white, male audience participant, Greg. His real name wasn't Greg but, if I’m honest, I’ve forgotten his real name.
Kikki and Greg chat. Kikki and Greg laugh, at times uncomfortably. Kikki and Greg cook a burger.
Sometimes the play is not a play. It's a conversation between two people: one cis man and one trans woman.
Kikki asks Greg:
“What would you like to drink?”
Greg says:
“A VB.”
Kikki asks Greg:
“When was the last time you cried?”
Greg says:
“I’d have to ask my husband.”
Kikki tells Greg a story about a time when a busload of school children pointed and laughed at her because of her clothes and her make-up. Kikki asks Greg:
“Have you ever had a busload of school children point and laugh at you because of your clothes and your make-up?”
Greg shakes his head.
Kikki asks Greg:
“Could you cut the onions for me?”
Charlie, a friend of a friend who I met in the foyer, says:
“Fascinating how she used the power of the stage to flip convention. In the situations she’s describing, she’s vulnerable. But audience participation puts Greg, the cis guy, in that vulnerable position. She wasn’t just evening the playing field, she was literally flipping the burger”
Kikki and Greg learn a lot. Kikki and Greg cry, at times uncomfortably. Kikki and Greg finish their burger.
The play eventually ends with these ingredients: tomato, lettuce, quality bread, onion and a beef patty. Is a burger just these ingredients? Kikki had a burger thrown at her, in broad daylight, at Flinders Street Station.
Kikki says:
"I didn't know people hated burgers that much to waste them like that."
A slur is not just a word. Misgendering is not just a mistake. Burgerz has taken an obvious example of transphobia and explained why it hurts so much more than just having to wash your clothes when you get home. A burger is not a fist, but the silent stares of onlookers make it feel like one.
The success of Burgerz depends heavily on Kikki. Kikki speaks fast, dresses nicely and has an incorrigible nature. Kikki glues the whole work together. Kikki smashes through the fourth wall and encourages you to smash it with her. Kikki belts truthful and emotional poetry atop a golden Honda bathed in rainbow light. Kikki galivants around the stage in a multicoloured jumpsuit and apron. Kikki is hot and powerful.
Kikki had a burger thrown at her, in broad daylight, at Flinders Street Station. Whether you’re looking for a bit of catharsis or you feel like you don’t understand why mixing up someone’s pronouns is a big deal, Burgerz delivers.
This is a negative review of Burgerz:
From the moment that Burgerz started with a car crashing through the side door of Theatre Works, I couldn't help but feel that the play had shot itself in the foot. The moment was amazing. The audience went absolutely wild. The car was blasting tunes. But I just kept thinking, "where to from here?"
What followed was a thematically wonderful performance hindered by some technical and dramaturgical weaknesses.
This show was unequivocally about Kikki. And yet, I would say that I spent about 30% of my time looking at the golden car that sat derelict at the backof the stage. The car was meticulously designed, filled with bits and bobs, covered in stickers and featured a green P plate stuck in the back window. But when I listlessly lost focus, as brains are wont to do, I was invited to focus on something completely different from Kikki’s story. The focus-pulling car meant that parts of Kikki's metaphors, descriptions and story were missed.
Burgerz also unites every theatrical element into creating huge shifts of emotion at each major plot beat. Throughout the play, we leapfrogged from droning subwoofers, dim lights and long, poetic monologues to upbeat dance music, coloured lights and bright costume changes. This emotional zero to one hundred lacked any justifiable reason beyond ensuring the work wasn't one-note. I was once told that no two elements in a play should achieve the same outcome. If the actor is making the audience feel sad and the music is doing the same, one of those things is wasting its time.
More importantly, there was a lack of audience care that I felt uncomfortable about in Burgerz. To be fair, I don't know the full extent to which the audience participant was looked after post-show, but I will say that the show was missing the key elements of care I would expect. According to the Live Performance Award, a performer is legally entitled to 30 minutes of paid time pre-show in order to prepare themselves for the work, and an additional 15 minutes post-show. Audience participants receive neither, which can result in pretty serious emotional distress. An imperfect workaround for this is to create breakpoints. Moments when the audience member is "clocked in" to the show and "clocked out".
Burgerz does a pretty good job of warming our audience member up, offering them a drink of their choice and having a gentle chat with them. This is a perfect example of a breakpoint. The action has stopped, the participant enters the space and the action resumes with them included. However, after being asked to open up live on-stage, after sitting unprepared under hot lights, and witnessing the full force of an impassioned and emotional speech about the experience with the burger that frames the play, our audience participant is simply directed offstage. No clap, no pause. Turning an unpaid audience member into a core part of your piece is a complicated choice, particularly when the themes of your work are so deeply confronting.
I often found myself returning to the question: "who is this play for?" Is it for me, a trans-woman who rarely partakes in queer community events? Is it for die-hard community members, activists, leaders and influencers? Is it for middle-of-the-road straight and gay liberals who haven’t thought deeply on trans issues?
Plays about trans people (or any marginalised community) get stuck in this question a lot. In order to ask the kinds of complex questions the community is interested in, it requires an amount of tacit knowledge; the pre-reading to this 3rd level subject in the Bachelor of Queer. In order to make the work accessible to the general riffraff of theatre patrons, the play has to become an educator, explaining thoughts, paradigms and theories. The problem is that most plays, including Burgerz, find themselves trying to do both – to stretch themselves between these two disparate locations and engage the most informed and educate the least.
All of the above resulted in a work I struggled to stay engaged with. It's hard to enjoy a talented trapeze artist when you can't help but notice there's no safety net.
Both of these reviews are completely true (except for not liking burgers, I do like burgers).
Burgerz is not a "3-star" middle-of-the-road production. There's a reason I didn't smush my positive and negative reviews together. Burgerz is a unique masterwork that takes a simple story, smashes it into pieces and makes you watch as it fits it back together, kintsugi-style. It's also a mismatched work that attempts to achieve far too much with far too little.
To get the most out of Burgerz, you have to accept that it's not perfect. There are moments that are clunky, slow and perhaps even dangerous. If you can accept these imperfections, the play, and Kikki especially, have a lot to offer you.
Burgerz plays at Theatre Works from 8 - 18 February. Find tickets and information here.
Hero image by Morgan Roberts, Production images by Daniel Rabin
Martha Latham hates art and thinks it should be defunded. She also thinks Myki inspectors should have guns. We really didn’t want her but we needed to hit our gender equity quotas. Find out which of those things are true @sad_goldfish.
This article has been generously donated by Martha.
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