In their Melbourne Fringe Show, First Trimester, performer Krishna Istha is seeking a sperm donor

Krishna Istha had a problem.

"I needed a sperm donor," the UK-based performance artist, comedian and writer for Netflix's Sex Education tells ABC Arts.

Istha and their partner, Logan Rea, who are both queer and trans masculine, decided they wanted to start a family, and found themselves having to navigate the best way to do that.

That performance is Istha's show, First Trimester, premiering in Australia for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

It involves an open call-out for potential sperm donors, who are briefed and interviewed on Zoom, before appearing with Istha live for a further interview on stage, in front of an audience. From these one-on-one on-stage interviews, Istha and Rea will select the donor for their future child, which Istha will carry.

It was a bit more difficult for Istha to convince their partner, a non-performer, that this method of finding their sperm donor was a good idea.

"He was like, absolutely not," Istha says. "This is a life that then becomes very public."

But Istha had scoured sperm banks for three years and found a frustrating lack of information available to them; this approach promised the possibility of learning more about their donor. And eventually, Rea came around to the idea.

Show 'full of levity'

First performed in London in 2023, First Trimester was nominated for an OFFIE (Off West End Award) for experimental theatre in 2024.

It toured Copenhagen, Dublin (where it won a judge's award at Dublin Fringe Festival) and Auckland (where Rea is from) in 2024.

The Melbourne season in October will be the last iteration of this part of Istha's three-part M:otherhood Project, before beginning the pregnancy process in 2026.

"From the outside, the show sounds very serious and also maybe a bit sensationalist," Istha says. "But actually the show is full of levity and there's a lot of humour in there and it comes from a lot of the questions I ask people, the conversations we have."

Istha says the show has enabled them to get beyond the impersonal and (for them) irrelevant information about eye colour or hair colour provided about donors in the anonymised sperm bank system.

"A really big thing in the UK was whether or not they had PhDs, so it was very much about what their job was and how much they'd studied," Istha says.

"And for us it was, I want to know who this person is. I want to know what they think, what they're like, and if they're going to be a nice person to have in our lives forever.

"Because even if you don't know anything about them, at 18, the child could contact them."

Collecting pearls of wisdom

In addition to potential sperm donors, Istha interviews people on stage who don't necessarily have sperm, but who might have some hard-won wisdom to share.

"Things that you can't just see on the internet. It's not like a BuzzFeed article. There's no list of how to be a good queer family."

In 2024, Istha and Rea created a short Netflix documentary, Sperm Donors Wanted! about the making of First Trimester and have plans to compile video from the live performances into a resource for other queer and trans families.

Second Trimester will be the next phase of the project, planned as a part-documentary film, part-theatre show, in which Istha's mum also appears, once they are pregnant.

Istha's mum is fully on board with the project. "She's just such a good ally," they say.

"She loves it. She's seen the show multiple times, and she sits there with a little notebook and makes her own list of people. She's like, 'That person's fun. Take that person.'

"I feel like her doing [Second Trimester] is in many ways for her; the second part is being able to show the world what it looks like to have a good ally for a parent."

Istha says that one of the heartwarming parts of First Trimester has been to experience an antidote to what they say feels like growing anti-trans public sentiment.

"I think the biggest surprise, the thing that I've really learned, is how kind people [in the audience and participants] are," Istha says.

"When you're a trans person at this time, consuming the media that you consume, I think you automatically assume most people are against you.

"The people that sign up for the show are such a random mix of people across age and gender and race and cultures; queer people, straight people, literally all sorts of people, and the through line has been that more people are willing to just take you as a human being as opposed to the shit that you see in media."

Beyond the sperm

What started as a search for a sperm donor has turned into something much bigger for Istha and Rea: the creation of a supportive community, a growing repository of knowledge for queer and trans families that will live beyond the life of the show, and an expansive idea of what family can be.

"I've got friends whose kids I look after sometimes," Istha says. "There's an Excel spreadsheet and a whole bunch of queer people take turns looking after the three-year-old. And I feel like that is something I've never really seen straight, heteronormative families do."

They acknowledge that communities of people looking after children is part of many cultures, including Indigenous cultures in Australia.

"But … colonialism and the West has said, 'This [with two parents] is how you do a family unit.'"

Although the idea of making space for their sperm donor in their idea of family was not their original plan, what they have learnt from making First Trimester has changed their mind.

"Someone who had a child through his friend's donation said, 'If you could have more people, would you not want that? Why would you want fewer people there for this child?' which really stuck with us."

First Trimester will be performed at Arts House as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.