> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The possible versions of you: QFWFQ - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-possible-versions-of-you-qfwfq/ - Published: 2026-09-30T13:28:46.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T13:36:15.000Z - Description: Gregory Nussen’s extraordinary QFWFQ tumbles through Calvino, queerness, Jewishness, family and Palestine. Funny, formally audacious and achingly tender, it turns the unfinished story into something profoundly alive. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews Early in *QFWFQ*, Gregory Nussen asks if anyone needs the toilet. The show has not begun, although of course it has. Nussen is still settling us, talking about beginnings, making sure we are comfortable. They ask a man sitting on the aisle if he needs to go. He has a strong bladder. A tiny pause. This is clearly the wrong answer. Nussen looks across the aisle at me. Sure. I need the toilet. I am escorted outside and told, in hushed tones, to make my way back in. Much later I discover that I may have used this absence to report the performance to the Institute for the Posterity of Everything. I have become, without knowing it, part of the fiction. This is the territory of *QFWFQ*: unstable, playful, full of trapdoors. Stories open onto other stories or stop altogether. Fiction wears the clothes of autobiography. Autobiography is attributed to someone else’s play. An event changes meaning retrospectively. Nussen keeps hovering at the edges of the performance, apparently trying to work out what kind of show they are making while performing it. Ten years in the making, *QFWFQ* grew from Nussen’s fascination with Italo Calvino, especially *If on a winter’s night a traveler*. I read Calvino’s novel as a teenager and remember the delicious disturbance of finding myself, the reader, dragged into its machinery. Here, twenty-odd years later, I am sitting inside the machine again. This time it has sent me to the toilet. One story begins in a snowy forest. A young man finds a church and inside, impossibly, a woman playing the piano. The image gathers around us. ![Gregory Nussen smiles in profile, with a large projected image and blue stage lighting behind them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/QFWFWQ-Gregory-Nussen-4.jpg) Gregory Nussen in **QFWFQ*. Photo: Andrew Max Levy Then the story breaks. Wrong script. A problem with the Institute. A phone call might be required. The disorder has its own precision, shaped with director Hannah Pilkes. Nussen is expansive, mischievous, vulnerable, forever seeming a breath away from losing the thread. They never do. Their stories proliferate. A Jewish summer camp. Queerness. Family. The Holocaust. Israel. Palestine. The absurdity of making theatre now, among Fringe shows excruciatingly concerned with the state of the world and Fringe shows excruciatingly unconcerned with it. For years, Nussen tried to get closer to Calvino. They read and researched, contemplated learning Italian, pushed further into the work. Eventually, they tell us, the forest became too dense for the light to come through. The sentence stays with me. So does another. Life can feel already written, yet we are expected to improvise. As *QFWFQ* gathers its fragments, this begins to sting. Nussen speaks of growing up queer and Jewish, of standing with Palestine, of the rupture this has caused within their family. The theatrical problem and the personal one begin to rhyme: the script exists; improvisation is demanded; depart too far from what has already been written and the boundaries reveal themselves. > “*You are always a possible you.*” I write that down too. The beauty of *QFWFQ* lies somewhere among these unfinished things. The snowy church remains unfinished. Other plays surface and dissolve. Jokes return carrying different meanings. Nothing quite settles into its proper category. Even Nussen flickers between performer, character and subject. At one point they describe our contemporary attention spans as dust: scattered into particles. Yet dust settles. It gathers. ![Gregory Nussen lies on the floor surrounded by scattered books, papers and notebooks.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/QFWFWQ-Gregory-Nussen-1.jpg) Gregory Nussen. Photo: Sonya Katarina By the end, *QFWFQ* has gathered inside me in much the same way: piano, snow, summer camp, ash, Calvino, Palestine, family, an imaginary Institute, a man with a strong bladder, my own brief disappearance through a theatre door. Fragments touching fragments until they begin to carry the weight of one another. I leave with the peculiar tenderness of pressing a bruise: an ache you find yourself returning to because there is something almost pleasurable in feeling precisely where it hurts. The forest is dense. The light comes through. --- [*QFWFQ*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/qfwfq?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at Trades Hall – Meeting Room as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 30 September–4 October 2026. --- Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *QFWFQ* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.