Pee Stick review | Melboune Fringe Festival | Courthouse Hotel

It can be a pretty confronting moment when a plastic stick covered in your pee is going to determine the rest of your life. In Pee Stick, we are introduced to 26 year-old Annie who may or may not be pregnant, but we will all know in roughly 50 minutes. In that time, Annie's mind runs rife with thoughts of her own childhood as well as what the future will bring, as she attempts to comprehend the possible changes in her life, all while incorporating some cheesy 80s dance moves and songs, this is 1987 after all.

Written and performed by Carly Milroy, Annie contends with issues a woman in the late 80s would have to face as a (potentially) single mother, from receiving judgements from strangers and gossipy shop assistants to the logistical nightmare of requesting maternity leave from her manager Colleen, where Annie spends her time transferring data from a floppy disk to a CD-ROM - this is the way of the future she excitedly informs us.

We also meet Annie's mother who despite her good intentions, constantly smothers Annie and thinks she knows what's best. Milroy is intelligent enough to not make the show about who the father of her baby is and most importantly, not shaming Annie as to why she was having unprotected sex. We never learn the identity of who the father is or any of the circumstances leading up to the encounter, which allows for the story to solely focus on what Annie wants to do and allows Milroy to really hone in on Annie's state of mind.

Pee Stick | Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

There are moments in our lives where we are thrown a curve ball and all our best-laid plans go out the window. This can take mere seconds or in Annie's case, 50 minutes. Presented as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival, Carly Milroy's Pee Stick is a charming comedy cabaret that follows Annie as she agonisingly awaits the outcome of her pregnancy test.

"Pee Stick is a story about time slowing down while a single woman waits in her bathroom for a pregnancy test result. The show largely takes place in her imagination, where we meet eccentric characters from her world prompting the big questions: what could having a baby mean for Annie's professional, personal and family life?" Milroy (who serves as writer and performer) says. "There's a lot of dumb fun in Pee Stick—awkward high school moments, sea-sick monsters, rhythmic traffic disputes—but ultimately it's a play about the compromises women are asked to make in the pursuit of motherhood."

"The play is set in 1987, which meant I could take the audience back to the beginnings of at-home pregnancy tests when women had to wait up to an hour for a result (conveniently also the running time of the show!). Even though this kind of agonising wait has been compressed down to a few minutes in 2017, the same emotions and reactions are experienced: dread, excitement, grief, love…it's timeless. I wanted to highlight that the assumptions, professional barriers and social stigmas Annie grapples with in 1987 unfortunately still deeply affect women today. Also it means I get to wear a bum bag."

Pee Stick review

Annie has just pee'd on a stick. And now, locked in her bathroom, has 45-53 minutes to ponder if her life is about to completely change or not. Written and performed by Carly Milroy, Pee Stick is a humorous and playful cabaret at how we deal when things in life don't go according to plan.

Despite a story of a woman waiting to discover if she is pregnant or not been told in every way shape and form, what set this show apart, was Milroy's decision to situate it in 1987. We are in a cute nostalgic world where there are no mentions of iPhones and the Internet but floppy disks and CD-ROMS! It also helps in raising the stakes on the outcome of Annie's pregnancy test, as the social stigma of a single mother in her 20s in that era was far more significant than what it is now.