The celebrated play taking on bathroom bigotry

For many women, the fleeting bond forged with strangers in a club toilet elicits a sense of sisterly solidarity. But for Rosie, the central character in British playwright Travis Alabanza’s powerful play Overflow, a knock on the bathroom door strikes fear into her heart. Hardly surprising, given the uproar around trans people’s right to pee in peace.

Starring actor, activist and trans woman Janet Anderson, the one-woman show marks its Melbourne debut at the Arts Centre during LGBTQIA+ festival Midsumma. Directed locally by Dino Dimitriadis, Overflow became the first Australian main stage production led by an entirely trans and gender-diverse cast and crew when it made its debut at the Darlinghurst Theatre Company in Anderson’s hometown of Sydney last year.

Janet Anderson plays Rosie in Overflow.Credit: Steven Siewert

“The power of the show is that you spend time with Rosie in this confined space while she just lets rip, feeling everything she thinks,” Anderson says. “The audience is strapped into her monologue. She has all the power, which is so rare for a trans performer. Often, we are relegated to the sidekick or the dead sex worker.”

Anderson’s family moved from Sydney to Westchester, New York, when she was four. She would beg her mum to take her to Broadway shows for her birthday. But, after returning to Sydney, transitioning during high school made her doubt her acting dreams.

“In the back of my little superstar mind, this [career] is exactly what I’d imagined, and it was all going very well,” she says. “But when I first transitioned, at about 15, I truly thought that I was leaving any hope of being a performer behind.”

One-woman show Overflow makes its Melbourne debut this week.Credit: Steven Siewert

Anderson has sung for Opera Australia, landed an agent while still in high school and has appeared in Sydney-set Paramount+ show Last King of the Cross. She believes her refusal to give up has led to her success. “The fact that I was being my authentic self and able to play the female roles that I’ve always wanted, then I really had to harness my ability.”

Anderson has a habit of standing her ground. She became the figurehead of the #LetThemSwim campaign in early 2021 after tweeting about her disappointment in the management of McIver’s Ladies Baths banning trans women.

“It felt much closer to home than a lot of the transphobia that you hear coming out of the UK and the US, where a lot of trans women have been murdered, because I swam there with my mates,” she says. “It was on my doorstep, so it felt like something I could have a hand in changing.”

Her tweet sparked a movement, with the viral protest leading to an in-person protest at the baths. The demonstration was covered by the media and Anderson wrote an opinion piece for Vogue. McIver’s subsequently changed its policy to welcome trans women. “I had a lot of help from amazing people, both trans and cis,” Anderson says. “It was an incredible, beautiful reminder of community.”

Janet Anderson on Overflow: “The power of the show is that you spend time with Rosie in this confined space while she just lets rip, feeling everything she thinks.”Credit: Steven Siewert

Dimitriadis, who is also trans, sent Anderson the script for Overflow a few months after the McIver’s commotion. It was the perfect fit. “It really was a stand-out,” she says. “Travis wrote the play in the context of the UK, which has its own flavour of transphobia, I guess, but so-called Australia is not that long behind.”

There’s something else lurking behind the bathroom battles, Anderson suggests. “It’s hiding a much deeper misunderstanding of what trans people even want, or who trans people are, and obviously, it’s all based in ignorance. Hate is basic ignorance.”

Theatre is a grand way to combat that, Anderson says. “For us to be able to sit together in a room, hear each other and be actively responding, especially when we have a more gender-diverse audience in the show, that’s the point. That’s why so many people leave Overflow so affected by it.”

She feels that sharing a space, a specific moment, is why Overflow has such an impact. “I think that if Rosie gets to illuminate an audience of 200 people every night for an hour, then that’s the best outcome.”

Overflow is on at Arts Centre Melbourne from January 31 to February 4 at at Geelong Arts Centre from February 8 to 10.

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