First Trimester
Cube, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
“All grown-ups were once children ... but only few of them remember it,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince. Krishna Istha’s radical performance First Trimester, in which they interview volunteering sperm donors onstage, inevitably sends its performers down memory lane.
Staged as part of a trans couple’s real-life journey to start a family, the production positions Istha and their guests inside an inviting remake of a clinic interview room: a gazebo tent warm with orange hues, workplace furnishings replaced with stylish side tables and lamps.
Sitting opposite the donors, Istha uses a randomiser to select questions. When asked “How will your relationship with your parents impact your parenting style?” one volunteer draws a connection between the busyness of his hardworking father and conscious efforts to ensure time with his own foster son.
Istha is a sharp interviewer, as questions riff on determinist stereotypes, whether biological (“Do you have flat feet?”) or cultural (“Do you carry a knife?”). Similarly, an audience might be surprised by their own presumptions, as one young donor references Kahlil Gibran’s century-old poem reminding self-fascinated parents that children are “sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself”.
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As recorded infomercials remind the audience of barriers to queer people becoming parents, the interviews encouragingly see prejudice vanish. When a father of adult children is asked what he thinks about Istha being on hormone therapy, or what he would think if their child turned out to be queer – the panicky speculations of the gender-critical movement – he is reassuringly unconcerned. That makes First Trimester an antidote of the age.
Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 21st
