Summertime in the Garden of Eden – Sisters Grimm

Overview

Summertime in the Garden of Eden began as a piece of scratch theatre, whipped up in three weeks and playing to packed out audiences in a Thornbury shed. A short November season at Theatre Works in St Kilda is the last chance for Melbourne audiences to catch a glimpse of Sisters Grimm's anarchic vision before they take the show to Sydney's Griffin Theatre.

Between its premiere in 2012 and now, the company — a collaboration between Ash Flanders and Declan Greene —have enjoyed a meteoric rise, cemented by their NEON Festival offering, The Sovereign Wife, a three-hour, two-interval epic that sold out after the first night. The Sisters' work leaves gender roles exploded in their wake, shattering familiar tropes of stage and screen.

In Summertime, the cotton fields of the American South provide rich pickings for their brand of melodrama, drag, and obscenity — undercut at all times by a keen, subversive edge.