Jopuka Productions, the Central Coast’s only not-for-profit youth arts theatre company, will make its first foray into political theatre with a new staging of the renowned Australian production GAYBIES in July.

Written by Helpmann Award winner Dean Bryant, GAYBIES  received rave reviews when it was first staged as a reading at Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival in 2013. Bryant wrote GAYBIES to inspire and inform the public on what it is like to grow up in families that were once considered hypothetical but are now controversial. It answers the question typically posed of such families: “But what about the children?”

Hotly political and deeply personal, GAYBIES is a moving piece of verbatim theatre that tells the story of children who have grown up with gay parents.

Drawn straight from interviews with children aged five to fifty, it features authentic accounts of family life told with humour, honesty and wisdom.

GAYBIES will be directed by Jopuka’s artistic director, Joshua Maxwell, a Gayby himself who found his life story the focus of national media attention during last year’s Marriage Law Postal Survey after writing an open letter to the Prime Minister about his upbringing with same-sex parents.

“Growing up with two mums was just as normal as all my friends,” Mr Maxwell said.  “No one cared until a girl like was me was on Play School, then it changed. That girl is a character in this show. It’s incredibly full circle.”

When Marriage Equality passed into law last year, Mr Maxwell was in Parliament House, Canberra, at the invitation of Dobell Federal Labor MP Emma McBride, to witness his own family’s story be told and add his voice to the advocates who sang ‘I Am Australian’ in the public gallery in an emotional moment he hopes to recapture on stage.

“Staging this production after the Marriage Equality victory in the 40th year of Mardi Gras feels incredibly fitting,” he said.  “We’ve been given the immense privilege of amending the end of the show to include the survey result. We want the audience to share in what that moment in Australian history felt like for rainbow families.”

 The production, in which Quinn Carter and upcoming emerging artists will perform three original songs written specifically for the production, plays a strictly limited season from July 20 at The Youth Arts Warehouse in Gosford and features a cast of 14, 50 percent of whom identify as members of the LGBTQI community.

GAYBIES  [Facebook event]  from Jopuka Productions [Facebook]will play at The Youth Arts Warehouse in Gosford from July 20.