Gender? I Hardly Know Them
Being queer in Alberta's not for the faint of heart. Your sex toys' batteries keep dying from the cold, your bar doubles as a senior's dance hall, and your government keeps trying to sell you on the merits of conversion therapy. But while your community's smaller, it's also uniquely awesome.
Straight from the heart of the God-fearing, gun-loving, beef-eating Alberta prairies, Gender? I Hardly Know Them is a fast-paced, whip-smart queer sketch show, created and performed by gay, hot, and short comedians Elena (or Eli) Belyea (they/she) and Syd Campbell (they/them). It features 20 sizzling sketches in under 60 minutes! It also flaunts a rainbow cast of characters: Jessica, a bank rep peddling rainbow credit cards to anti-capitalists at Pride; Dalton and Reggie, thong enthusiasts (not that kind of thong); and Greg and Stan, an ill-fated pair of star-crossed dads.
Because so many LGBTQ+ stories set in conservative backdrops focus on grief and isolation, Gender? I Hardly Know Them centres queer self-actualization and joy. Sketches are punctuated by monologues from Elena and Syd's lives about growing up gay in 'Berta, giving the audience a chance to land and get their bearings before the jokes start flying again. These monologues (inspired by Jenny Slate’s interviews in Stage Fright and Hannah Gadsby's Nanette) make Gender? I Hardly Know Them more than "just a sketch show", they're the connective tissue tying the show together, providing an unflinching look of the complex realities of life as part of a marginalized community. Risky, raunchy, and surprisingly heartfelt, Gender? I Hardly Know Them will get you laughing, whatever your pronouns.
We created and premiered Gender? I Hardly Know Them back in August 2019 at the Edmonton Fringe Festival where it received rave reviews, sold-out and was held-over for two nights at the Grindstone Comedy Theatre. By March 2020, we'd received invites to curated festivals across Canada (including rEvolver) and a Canada Council Travel Circulation and Touring grant to share our gay agenda with the world. But then COVID-`19 intervened, forcing us to postpone our sexy summer plans.
Because there's a limit to how much sourdough you can bake in a day, we started filming and posting daily sketches to our Instagram and TikTok from the comfort of our own homes (we now have an audience of over 7K followers). We also received $100K from Canada Council to develop our show into a web series. But despite these recent successes, we still haven’t had the chance to share this show with a live audience on Treaty 7 land.
Our target audience is queers, trans/non-binary folks, femmes, thems, futches, butches, bitches, good feminists, bad feminists, parents who struggle with their kids’ pronouns, kids who struggle with their parents’ pronouns, and anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong. That said, we've witnessed our show's widespread appeal with viewers from all walks of life.
The world's changed a lot since 2019. That’s why we’re excited to share a fresh version of this hilarious show with the Calgary crowd, featuring local musical guest, Miranda Martini, our greatest hits from the original, plus a smorgasbord of new sketches we've been developing to keep the show relevant as heck.
To get your tickets now, or to learn more, visit downstage.ca.
