John Greyson's newest work, the remarkable comedy musical The Making of "Monsters", is constructed as a mock behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of a film. The real-life incident behind the film being made is the beating to death of a gay Toronto high school teacher by five teenagers in 1985. At the film's center, and the source of Greyson's satire, is the problem of how to effectively represent the brutal action of these "monsters" within a television movie. This problem is taken on by the biggies of 1930s aesthetics theory: Monsters producer, Georg Lukacs, wants to tap the audiences' sympathies by presenting the murder in terms of the youths' psychology in a realist drama. The film's director, Bertolt Brecht-who is literally played by a fish-wants to use alienating devices to foreground the patriarchal mechanisms that support such violence. Sentimental emotions bump up against songs of rage, culminating in a crisis of representation. And this battle of aesthetics is captured by the black documentary filmmaker, Lotte Lenya. With his own low-budget, high-concept aesthetic (as seen in Urinal and Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers), Greyson consciously strives to be a fish out of (mainstream) water: "(W)e are oppressed not just by the various institutions of injustice, but also by their representation into mainstream media which provide catharsis and preclude social change...(O)ur passions need new forms to find voice." Stephen Cummins' Resonance, "beginning with a gay bashing in the back streets of Sydney, uses gesture, dance and interior monologue to explore this act of violence as it resonates through the lives of the people involved." (S.C.)