by Laura Kressly

Best friends Noa and Nina are 17 and have the world at their feet. They are bright, articulate, young women with busy, privileged lives. Despite this, they agonise over the possibility of the world passing them by and whether or not they might actually be quite boring. To manage their worries, they project them – and their queerness – onto a high-conflict romance of their own creation. Set on a contemporary American ranch, scenes from their heightened fiction intersect with the real in entertaining and touching ways.

Playwright Billie Esplen uses contrasting styles to good effect. The girls’ conversations at school are familiar and intimate, candidly touching on topics like their favourite teachers, insecurities about being virgins, and that they are nothing like characters in films. These moments speak to a gentle nostalgia for the fizzy combo of hope, dreams, and angst unique to teenagers, even if this pair at the extremely bright and posh end of teenage experience. Meanwhile, extracts from the Western they create embrace silliness by exploiting melodrama and rural romance film tropes. These scenes are deliberately a mishmash of accents, geographic regions, and no understanding of American agrarian life, since Nina and Noa have no exposure to authentic American culture(s). Their ignorance is excusable given their youth, and the ridiculousness of the story they make gently pokes fun at teenage fantasies and fanfic.

Though the alternation between real and imaginary quickly becomes predicable and the dramaturgy is pretty pedestrian, there are many individual moments that in turn charm and entertain even though they lean hard on sentimentality. Though the payoff is also gentle and easily anticipated, its clear that the impact on the characters is huge. It’s not unlike the many events that feel like mountains to young people, but are molehills to cynical adults.

The character-driven play is superbly performed by Julia Pilkington (Nina) and Georgia Vyvyan (Noa). Their physical and vocal versatility mean they clearly bounce between worlds with energetic agility. They are convincing as the teenagers as well as their alter egos, a brooding, nomadic farmhand (Pilkington), and manic pixie farmgirl (Vyvyan). Both of the latter are utterly hilarious. Their performances and chemistry are the strongest part of the production, though the queer coming-of-age/self-discovery plot also brims with warmth.

Cowboys and Lesbians runs through 9 March.

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