“Who do you want to speak to, Mary, or Effie?” asks actor and comedian, Mary Coustas over the phone.
Effie (Stephanidis), Coustas’ alter ego is fixed in the Australian psyche, she has become corporeal.
Effie’s new show Hello Good Thanks – Better Out Than In, is on at Gasworks Theatre, July 9.
Better out than in, leans on Effie’s absurdist ethnic trope, as Coustas says to, “detoxify the last couple of years, with comedy and absurdity”.
The show is about “lockdowns and all of that” Coustas says.
“It’s about what happened to us, and it is in response to COVID, one thing that we all share in common, and it’s not very often that we get to share the same exact issue, apart from taxes and death, now we have COVID”.
Some Greek Australians have been seduced by anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine conspiracy absurdities. Effie pokes fun at that, and avoiding righteous indignation.
“Everyone has a right to an opinion, and we have freedom of speech, but it seems lately that some people have put freedom of speech on a diet,” says Coustas.
Coustas embraces the argumentativeness in Greeks. “They’ve always been known to have their own opinions, they turn debate into a sport, I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece, and I love that debate is a debate, not a fight.”
She loves watching the news in Greece when they “split up the screen like the Brady Bunch and they’re all yelling at the same time”.
“I have an opinion and it might not be the same as yours and that’s fine because I’m not you.”
Effie in another interview said that she graduated from the Academy of Hairdressing, “code for: I dropped out in year 10”.
Coustas, in sharp contrast, has a degree from Deakin University in performing arts and journalism.
Effie is like Cousta’s commedia dell arte mask, it allows the comedian to poke and pull at the farcicality of daily life. Effie is the migrant’s daughter who never ‘made it’, a sexually charged, suburban princess bathed in solipsistic absurdity. She is the brash denunciation of middle-class milk toast prejudices.
“I love inflating things, the Greeks are inflated by nature, some would say delusional, some would say up themselves, but I built a character on those same principles.”
Critics in the mainstream media find Effie hard to accommodate, and yet she is the most significant female comedian Australia has produced in 40 years. Her performances pack out and she is a brand on her own.
The first time I interviewed Coustas was in Adelaide in 1989, she was performing in the revolutionary Wogs out of Work, with her co-conspirators, Nick Giannopoulos, George Kapiniaris and Simon Palomares.
Wogs out of Work still stands as the most successful stage show to date in Australia. It was the first Australian ethnic comedy, and it was owned by us, ‘the wogs’.
Coustas and co, waged guerrilla war on stage against the racist epithet ‘wog’ and paved the way for Nazeem Hussein, Aaron Chen, Sooshi Mango, Michelle Law and many others.
In This Is Personal, Coustas’ recent one-woman show at the Opera House in Sydney, there was no Effie safety cord. She exposed the grief of having a stillbirth and reflected on “bullying and racism” among a palimpsest of personal narratives.
“I had a stillborn, that happens to one in six people a day in Australia, I was one of those six on that day, it wasn’t like out of nowhere, I mean I didn’t anticipate it, I never dared to imagine it, but it did happen and I’m not the only one that happens to.
Coustas says that she wasn’t the “victim of something random”.
“You are planning for life’s most common miracle, and at times, that miracle doesn’t happen, or it happens in a very tragic way.”
When she went through racism as a child, like many of us, she kept telling herself, “This isn’t personal” and “racism happens to anyone.” But it was personal, she says, “it was happening to me, it was real”.
“Wogs out of Work was a response to the racism we all went through.”
Mary Coustas’ Effie, is a loadstar for ethnic comedy and female comedians. Coustas finds it funny when Anglo feminists talk about “women becoming invisible.”
“There are no invisible Greek women, Greek women were never invisible, we weren’t born invisible, we don’t act invisible, we run the show.”
“I don’t think you know many Greek or Italian women I say to my Anglo feminist colleagues”.
“Greek grandmothers were the original feminists – no bras, no hair removal, no labels – but I’m not blind to sexism, at the same time I do not want to take away the urges of the alpha male, right”.
“I am certainly not going to sit there and be silent, in the shadows, unless you really want to be a victim and there’s plenty of those in Greek culture, it’s an art form.”
Coustas says she gorges on “every flavour of Greek”
“There’s just so many fundamentals that we can easily put to the side if we were to be bowing to the Anglos.”
Coustas talks at a machine gun pace, and the subjects covered range from cancel culture, freedom, and death, Greece and politics, ancient drama, and how to make people “lean forward in live theatre”.
Coustas dismisses the idea that comedians like Ricky Gervais have been ‘cancelled’, “he’s on Netflix and has millions of fans.”
“Comedy is not there to make everyone feel comfortable,” Coustas says.
“When I put a show together and I don’t want my audience comfortable, do not want them anticipating what’s coming, I want them alert.”
Hello Good Thanks – Better Out Than In will have all of Mary Coustas’ audiences on high alert.
When: 9 July
Where: Gasworks Theatre
For tickets go to: www.gasworks.org.au/whats-on/effie-hello-good-thanks-better-out