The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal by Ethel Yap

The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal is a gender-reversed adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which tracks the relationship between a straight couple, Amy (formerly the male character “Jamie”) and Danny (formerly the female character “Cathy”), from their first date, to their marriage, to the end of their relationship in a divorce. The structure of the musical is such that each character takes turns to sing solo songs describing the journey of their relationship from their perspective, with Danny’s timeline going in reverse from end to beginning, and Amy’s timeline going in a chronological manner from beginning to end. The two characters only meet on stage once in the middle of the musical, where they sing their wedding duet together. Their relationship could be summarized as having an explosive start, with their paths beginning to diverge when Amy finds success as a novel writer while Danny struggles to gain recognition as a musical theatre actor, and finally ending in divorce after Amy cheats on Danny when he is away from New York City on a performance tour.

The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal was developed under Centre 42's Basement Workshop (now known as the Creation Residency). Read about Basement Workshop here.

This workshop adaptation strives to use the device of a character gender-reversal to tease out assumptions and questions about gender roles dynamics, power and control that might exist in a straight relationship within the text of The Last Five Years, but would remain un-surfaced with a regular casting approach.

The main areas of exploration would include:

• The difference between what it means to be a successful man versus a successful woman
• Assumptions of male expectations of workplace success versus female expectations of family commitments
• The assumption of cheating within a relationship as being expected and unsurprising for men but not for women
• Assumptions of  male indifference versus female desperation in straight relationships
• Assumptions of male initiative versus female submission in straight relationships

Many discussions have arisen about the way in which men and women relate to each other, as well as the differences in expectations of male versus female behavior in personal and public spheres. The team seeks to use the method of gender-swap casting as a means to throw light upon these issues and provide a more critical lens questioning the validity of ingrained expectations.

The workshop aims to then examine how the transference of these explorations from text-based questions to physically embodied performance calls into question the reality of assumptions held, and whether or not a gender-swapped performance of the text can still be convincing, realistic, and relatable to present-day straight relationships in an urban, metropolitan setting.

In addition, there would be the added advantage of also giving the workshop’s team and audience members an opportunity to explore the limitless possibilities of unconventional casting choices, allowing the process of casting to work as an apparatus via which an existing work may be able to yield previously unearthed insights. The team can then explore how this can be a framework which may be applied to any other type of text-based theatrical work, with The Last Five Years being the test-bed for such an exploration.

The workshop aims to be the first part of an on-going process, working towards a fully-staged gender-swapped adaptation of The Last Five Years in the near future.

• The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal's Facebook Page
• Tickets to the production