2017 House Programs All the Sex I Ever Had | Page 4

With a cast drawn from locals with no stage
experience and content based around their own
lives, All the Sex I’ve Ever Had is an entirely new
work wherever it plays.
So far the list of cities it has notched on the bedpost
range from Singapore to Prague, Philadelphia to
Vienna. You might wonder if sex is the same the
world over.
Monogamy doesn’t play a big role
in many people’s lives. I think
monogamy is a bit of a myth, the
way it’s understood as the norm.
Director Darren O’Donnell says that the fruits of the
work have revealed the odd regional difference—
in the UK of the 60s and 70s, for instance, “they
drank a lot. Like a lot. The role that alcohol played
in hook-ups was really interesting.” In Portland on
the US West Coast, on the other hand, the same
period saw “a tendency for those guys to have been
in encounter groups and all about psycho-therapy,
and they examined relationships more because it’s
a little hippy-dippy in Portland.”
With a sample size of only six people per
city, however, O’Donnell is cautious about
generalisations and says that the consistencies
that have emerged wherever the work has
unfolded are more fascinating. One of the biggest
surprises that O’Donnell and the co-creators at
Mammalian Diving Reflex have found again and
again is that “monogamy doesn’t play a big role in
many people’s lives. I think monogamy is a bit of a
myth, the way it’s understood as the norm. It exists
but it’s not the norm. That was interesting.”
Good times and bad, there’s no denying that the
generation opening up on All the Sex has lived
through upheavals on both personal and global
fronts. “They showed up when nobody could talk
about sex at all and didn’t even know where babies
came from until their teens in some cases,” says
O’Donnell.
“Nobody ever mentioned menstruation to any of
the women, they were always surprised when
that happened to them. And then they were the
second-wave feminists in the 60s, they were the
sexual revolution, they were at the centre of all
that. They’ve been through a ton of stuff and they’ve
gone from one world to a very different world and
they’ve been the fulcrum for that.”
It’s one thing to live that life, another to share it.
The cast of ordinary citizens that Mammalian
Diving Reflex brings to the stage for this work
isn’t composed of performers or celebrities,
but merely people who’ve made it into their 60s
and beyond. That they are able to open up so
freely and generously about their lives—and the
intimate moments they’ve had along the way—is
testament to the careful and considered process
that O’Donnell and the company have developed
across the years.
O’Donnell’s shorthand term for what the
company does is ‘social acupuncture’. “It’s trying
to create situations in which we poke at social
dynamics and adjust the dynamics a little bit so
that energy flows in slightly atypical ways.”
Mammalian Diving Reflex’s catalogue of works
are full of such unexpected interventions
into civic life: Get Out of My Room saw teens
commandeering a hotel room during a design
festival in the building, while Dare Night sees
participants challenged to breach the rules of
Another realisation that is so consistent as to
almost form a rule is that “if you live to the age
of 65 and beyond, you will have suffered. You will
probably have suffered some degree of tragedy and
you will have been depressed for periods of time.
Nobody gets a free ride in this world and everybody
suffers. Everybody has periods of really, really
difficult times.”