He shoots, he scores! Men Express Their Feelings takes a shot at toxic masculinity
Structured like a hockey game, Sunny Drake’s comedic play explores what it means to be a “man”
David Underhill (left) and Ishan Sandhu in Men Express Their Feelings. Photo by Tina Krueger Kulic.
Zee Zee Theatre presents Men Express Their Feelings from March 18 to April 3 at Firehall Arts Centre
WITH FOUR OLDER brothers, Sunny Drake grew up in a “sports-obsessed” household. Saturdays were all about field hockey and rugby in his native Brisbane. He moved to Canada 11 years ago, and, one day while listening to sports radio, the Toronto-based theatre artist scored an idea for a new play.
The Leafs had just lost a big game, and fans were being interviewed. A reporter asked: “How do you feel about the loss?” One of the man’s responses went something like this: “I sort of feel like, kind of like, you know, like, I don’t know, like, like, I don’t know, when something bad happens, you know, like, you sort of, kind of, you feel like, kind of… really bummed.”
Drake is relaying the fan’s thoughts in a phone interview with Stir, adding: “It was this long, epic struggle to express his emotions. It got me wondering: Did he know how he felt but was in front of his mates being watched and didn't know what the appropriate kind of language was to use? Was he really trying hard to reach the word ‘bummed’? There were so many layers to it.”
Listening to that short broadcast led to the creation of Men Express Their Feelings, Drake’s comedic theatre piece that is having its Vancouver premiere, directed by Zee Zee Theatre’s artistic and executive director, Cameron Mackenzie. Set inside a community hockey-rink locker room, the play is structured like a hockey game, with three periods and instant replays that depict moments from different characters’ viewpoints. Two teen hockey players and their fathers are forced by the minor hockey-league chair to work through their feelings after a tense scuffle between the dads in the parking lot. Drawing on sports culture, Canada’s national pastime, and Drake’s experience as a trans male, it challenges stereotypical assumptions about masculinity, gender, sexuality, identity, and what it means to be a “man”.
“For me it’s really looking at how, just like hockey, masculinity can be fantastic and awesome at its best but toxic and lethal at its worst,” says Drake, who played and coached field hockey for over a decade. “As a transgender man, masculinity and manness have been a study for me for my whole life; it’s something I was blocked out of. Sometimes I find that when you have to look from the outside to something you’re shut out of, it can give you a very particular window into the world.”
Ishan Sandhu (left) and David Underhill in Men Express Their Feelings. Photo by Tina Krueger Kulic.
Drake, whose theatre works have been presented in over 60 cities around the world and translated into four languages, says he was initially hesitant to talk about being trans in the media when it came to doing interviews for Men Express their Feelings. “At first I worried that some audiences of cis men would sort of go, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ or would discredit the work by saying ‘You’re not a real man,” Drake explains. “Then I had a profound realization that something I have deeply in common with many cis men is that if you challenge the rules of masculinity or rules of manness and try to be a different sort of man in any kind of way, you get accused of not being a real man. That’s what get cis men get told as well.
“I’m kind of uniquely positioned too, because, after burying a number of trans impulses as a kid—I grew up in an era where I literally did not meet another person who I knew was trans until my 20s, an era of absolute cultural void of trans representation—in burying my own trans impulses, then as a teenager very strongly identifying as a teenage girl, I have some windows into very different ways the world has treated me, very different ways that the world has seen me,” Drake says. “Being allowed into women’s spaces when I myself was identifying as a woman with other people identifying as women, I really began to understand and see the impacts of men on women and nonbinary people and also saw the ways that many masculine women actually struggle with some similar things that masculine men struggle with. There are so many layers of gendered experiences and the way those experiences play on our bodies and our expectations of us.”
Drake, who was commissioned by the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, Playwrights Guild of Canada and ATFC to write the 2019 World Theatre Day message for Canada, won the Playwrights Guild of Canada national comedy award in 2021 (The Chris Tolley & Dharini Woollcombe Comedy Award) for Every Little Nookie, which will have its world premiere at the Stratford Festival in 2022.
He carved his own path into the arts world, starting out at a time when there was no place for him as a trans person in normatively gendered theatre training. He put on shows himself in backyards, living rooms, and warehouses, eventually taking his work to mainstream venues as well as youth centres and rural town halls, paving a way for other trans voices.
Sunny Drake. Photo by Luis Mora
Drake works closely with consultants in all of his productions to achieve authenticity. In the case of Men Express Their Feelings—starring Quinn Churchill and Ishan Sandhu as 17-year-old hockey players with Jeff Gladstone and Munish Sharma as their duelling fathers—he collaborated with hockey experts as well as multiple South Asian consultants to develop the diverse characters and to find appropriate language. Getting it right matters for reasons that go beyond having a solid script.
“I’m really interested to have this piece be a contribution to rewriting the playbook of masculinity and being men,” Drake says. “I think a lot of men and masculine people are really waking up to the enormous costs of very restricted sort of masculinity, and a lot of men in my experience are really crying out for change and wanting to do things differently waking up to the physical, emotional and mental health costs of not being able to be themselves in their lives. There’s a cost of not being able to have intimacy in relationships they want or feeling like a failure as a dad or a husband or a partner or a colleague. It’s really a response to what I’m convinced is a desire for many men to actually rewrite the playbook of masculinity. And have fun while we’re doing it.”
While he has full respect for dramas that tackle difficult subjects from a serious point of view, Drake has a personal preference of approaching complex topics through comedy.
“I think humour is such an interesting vehicle into having hard conversations,” Drake says. “When you can laugh out loud at something, it opens audiences into a different sort of conversation, and it’s really accessible to a much wider range of audience members, particularly in 2022. It’s been a really rough time for a lot of people, so getting to explore some serious and difficult things through comedy just feels like a much easier way in.”
Drake, who’s the current creator-in-residence with Why Not Theatre and was the 2019 playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, says he was pleasantly surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reception Men Express Their Feelings received at its premiere in Calgary in 2020 just before lockdowns and the way women and nonbinary folks enjoyed it. The Calgary Herald called it “an instant Canadian classic”. “The work is definitely a call to men to look at the costs of a restrictive type of masculinity and consider change, but I just found it was a really fun experience for people of other genders who have to deal with the antics of men on a daily basis in some way,” he says.
Oh, and part of his research for the play included spending time in a hockey-rink men’s locker room. “The first thing I noticed was the incredibly potent smell,” Drake says. “You would need a decade and very serious chemical cleaners to get rid of that smell.”
More information is at zeezeetheatre.ca
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