Female Transport/Lilies

The A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) Program presents repertory performances of Female Transport by Steve Gooch and Michel Marc Bouchard’s Lilies.

Female Transport is an account of the life and death struggle of six female convicts forced to band together to overcome oppression in order to survive the tumultuous six-month boat journey from England to Australia in 1807. As the women face the challenges of surviving captivity, disease, and the whims of a sadistic crew, they learn certain truths about society, specifically the biases and injustices of a male-dominated class system. Ultimately, the prisoners forge unlikely alliances and discover moments of humanity and hope within their captivity.

Lyric, erotic, and redemptive, Lilies unfolds as a play-within-a-play that centers on an impassioned love between two young men at a Catholic boys’ school in rural Canada in 1912. As the story opens, Bishop Jean Bilodeau is summoned to a Québécois prison to hear the confession of Simon Doucet, a boyhood friend jailed for a murder he did not commit 40 years earlier. But instead of the confession he expects to hear, Bilodeau is forced to watch a play re-enacted by Doucet’s prisonmates detailing the horrendous and shocking events that transpired in their teenage years. A tense drama of tangled emotions and unfulfilled longing, Lilies was adapted into a film by John Greyson that became an audience favorite at the 1996 San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and won the Canadian Genie (equivalent to the American Academy Award) for best picture of 1996.