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06/06/2019 12:01 AMWhen does a personal and intimate conversation turn into theater?
For George Mann and Nir Paldi, partners on stage and off, it was their talk as a gay couple on whether they should become parents—or not—that led to their theater piece No Kids, a show that will be part of this year’s 24th International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The show will play Wednesday through Friday, June 12 to 14 at the Iseman Theatre in New Haven.
“Over the years the conversation has inevitably come up on several different occasions,” says Mann during a telephone interview from Israel, where the British couple was visiting before heading to the U.S. “At first Nir was more passionate about having children than I was. I was a bit scared of it to be honest.”
“I brought the question of having kids up first,” says Paldi. “It was always something I was interested in and felt we would complement each other and make very good parents.”
In the past few years, the two decided not only would they get more serious about the discussion, they would make theater out of it for their Bristol, England-based theater company Ad Infinitum.
Mann’s reaction was: “Are you crazy? That’s too personal. No way.
“In the end, I came around,” says Mann.
“It matched with the kind of work we make,” says Paldi, “where we take on a subject that we feel passionate about.”
Paldi says same-sex couples—if they want to have children—have to go out of our way to find a way of doing it. That process is deliberate and detailed “and I just thought there was some drama—and entertainment—in it, all the while raising some important ideas to discuss.”
“I had this fear of interacting with children,” says Mann, “and I didn’t know what to do with them. This fear started to go away in the process of putting the show together—and I started to feel more comfortable around my nephews and nieces, too.
“Some of my fears related in part to being gay and growing up in the ’80s and ’90s when gay people were being shamed publicly,” he says. “So I had to go beyond that roadblock and actually visualize myself being a parent.”
Sometimes art and real life collided.
“As we were getting to the end of the piece,” Mann says, “we had to decide what we would do and that put a lot of pressure on us. I thought, ‘God, I don’t know what I want.’ I found [the question about whether to become parents] quite terrifying and was overwhelmed. But then, I thought, ‘Wait, it’s a play and my life is real and I can take more time if I want to. I don’t have to make the decision now. We just have to find out what the end of the play is.’”
With gay marriage legal in many countries, gay couples are dealing with conversations heterosexuals typically have, Paldi says.
“I think, in general, it’s much more clear to them—or at least there’s a clearer path because having kids is such an expected demand,” he says.
But in creating the piece and then performing it in England and Scotland and on tour, they’ve found that in grappling with the should-we-become-parents question they were not alone—and that it echoed talks that heterosexuals have as well.
“We’re surprised at how powerfully straight audience members reacted to the show—particularly women who have to give up so much as mothers without much support from society—and how they related to the same questions,” says Paldi. “It’s very universal, this question about kids.
“Everyone at some point or another will be confronted by the desire—or lack of it—to have children,” Paldi adds. “Or how many. Or not enough. Or if can’t have them. And if not, with a surrogate. Or a friend?”
And their final decision?
“We’re not going to tell you because we don’t want to spoil the ending,” says Mann of the show, which he describes as “extremely playful; full of music, song, and dance; and which is very funny and bold.”
“But I will say we have a clearer idea of what we both want and what we don’t want,” Mann continues. “If we did start out in separate places—that I had more fear and Nir was more the romantic—it got us to where I became a bit more romantic about it and Nir got more real.”
And did they decide if they wanted a son or daughter?
“Yes we did—and, of course, we’re not similar,” he says. “It’s all in the show.”
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.