HILARY
The last six months started with an end: July 1 was closing
night of The Hypochondriac at the Eternity Playhouse. I bid a sad
farewell to that joyful production and promptly submitted it to Australian
Plays, where it’s published and available here.
Having loved the experience of adapting Moliere for the
modern age, I have taken the practice a step further, with a 1705 English play
by Susannah Centlivre. With director Sarah Giles and a cast of four energetic,
intelligent and hilarious actors, last November we read a number of plays by eighteenth-century
female playwrights, and lit on this particular one as being the most
subversive, original and downright weird. With support from Bell Shakespeare I
have been working on a draft that honours the original while making it fresh
and streamlined for a contemporary audience.
National Theatre of Parramatta commissioned me to adapt The
Comedy of Errors for young children with no experience of Shakespeare.
Thank God for hats, beards, glasses and funny accents, I thought as I wrangled
a 13-character play into a version for 5 actors. However, I discovered in our
workshop that even these are unnecessary when you have phenomenally talented
actors (though they do help). With director Stefo Nantsou, designer Imogen Ross
and composer Maria Alfonsine, we had a week of merriment capped with a
discerning and appreciative test audience from a local primary school. What to
call a show that isn’t the original, but wouldn’t exist without it? Having
struggled for a while for a title, I put out a distress call to 7-ON, and
thanks to Our Vanessa it’s called Ha Ha Woops.
Not plays, but calling on playwriting skills: I did a couple
of wonderfully rewarding projects for the State Library of NSW, writing
audio-scripts for two upcoming exhibitions (details to follow on this blog
soon). Each required a lot of historical research, and one in particular
centred on old Sydney, which is an ongoing obsession of mine. I also wrote an
audio guide for the Museum of Contemporary Art and their current exhibition on
photographer David Goldblatt. A pleasure to do, opening up a South African history of
which I’d previously known nothing.
I continued serving on the board for the Australian Script
Centre, and had two happy stints dramaturging—a musical for a promising
Excelsia student, and an exciting new play by Fred Copperwaite, through
Moogahlin and PlayWriting Australia.
September saw the CD launch of The
Red Tree the musical I wrote with composer Greta Gertler Gold,
returning in July to the Sydney Opera House.
I have continued working with my picture book collaborator
Antonia Pesenti on Summer Time, the third in our trilogy about place,
published by NewSouth: look out for it next Christmas.
DONNA
The thing I’m still assimilating is my attendance at the
11th International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Santiago de Chile in
October. Emma Mary Hall and Grace Pundyk, both from Melbourne, were also
selected as Australian delegates. Skype and email enabled us to get together
before we’d met in person to obtain funding from the Australia Council to cover
our conference expenses. This meant that we had the support we needed to see
our various plays read in Spanish, participate in workshops, see performances,
immerse ourselves in discussions with women playwrights from around the world,
and then retire to our Airbnb apartment each night to debrief over a bottle of
local red. It was wonderful to share the experience with Emma and Grace—and our
New Zealand counterpart Desiree Gezentsvey—and to reflect on the conference
proceedings from their points of view. We’re writing an essay due for
publication on the australianplays.org
website at the end of January, so check it out if you’d like to hear more.
After my residency in March with the Booranga Writers’
Centre in Wagga Wagga, I was asked to contribute a piece to the Centre’s annual
new writing anthology called fourW. My short play Olympia and Phoung
is included in the latest volume which was published in November. Originally
staged during The 428 Project in 2010, it’s a personal favourite among
my short plays, and I’m really happy to see it in print.
Also on the publishing front, Currency Press will publish my
2004 play Tales From The Arabian Nights in May 2019. Written at the
height of the Tampa refugee crisis, I decided to use a framing story about
about refugees, rather than beheaded women, not knowing that the ensuing
refugee and offshore detention crises would keep this play in the spotlight. I’m
really delighted that Currency can help this play reach a wider audience,
especially schools who who are seeking ways to engage with these issues.
Two long term mentorships came to an end with writers from
Milk Crate Theatre and Blacktown Arts Centre. Both women—Pauline Trenerry and
Gabby Florek—made the most of the experience, and got to see their hard work up
on the floor in readings with a professional cast.
Teaching-wise, there were my usual scriptwriting gigs at the
University of Wollongong and Excelsia College. A big shout out to Alison Lyssa
who expertly took my Excelsia class while I was overseas. My students loved
you!
Other than that, I kept working on my two new plays The
Secret Warzone and Flame Tree Street. They are the writing
equivalent of slow-cooking, and I hope they will end up just as tasty and
satisfying.
VANESSA
Another six months. Crikey is all I can say to that.
Because, gentle reader, it has been six months of awesome.
Mid 2018 I directed my first play, Angela Betzien’s
extraordinary The Dark Room. It was challenging, exciting and more than
that it was fabulous. It was an independent theatre play so weekend after
weekend of rehearsal, and doing other things I had never done before, sitting
with sound designers and lighting designers and … designers and plotting and
planning and more weekends and the directing and the actors and the incredible
rush you get when you sit at opening night and go … wow.
I said yes because I thought it would help me be a better
playwright but it also very quickly became the realisation that I want to
direct more. So after The Dark Room I also directed a short play for a
short play festival in Newcastle and I’ll do another next year. Unexpected and
yet completely not. Playwrights direct. Several of the Sevens have already
directed. My next challenge is to direct one of my own works.
The other part of this past six month has been the
production of my play A Ghost In My
Suitcase by Barking Gecko Theatre. The play is adapted from Gabrielle
Wang’s beautiful children’s novel of the same name. It has been developed over
three years under the guidance of directors Matt Edgerton and Ching Ching Ho
and it opened at the 2018 Melbourne International Arts Festival in October. It
goes on to have a season at the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Festival in
January 2019 and it is then on in Perth in February/March 2019 and it is the
biggest show I have ever had on people and it is utterly GORGEOUS and I am
UTTERLY THRILLED.
And apart from that, this side of 2018 has heralded a sort
of new, more positive, more pro-activey playwright sort of me.
I have written a new play Awkward Dancing which I’m showing companies, along with Captain Dalisay, The River and Chipper. I’m collaborating with another
playwright (Ross Mueller) on a new play called Something About The End Of The World. I’m meeting people. I’m being
brave. I’m not giving up. I’m laughing a lot. And I’m writing. Always.
NOËLLE
My year ended in Japan’s Kansai region, in Kyoto, Kobe and
Osaka. Part holiday, part research and enjoying cool winter weather in all
three cities (I’m not a fan of Australian summers). Earlier in the year, in
September, I went to Canberra for the opening of the National Museum of
Australia/British Museum exhibition Rome: City and Empire for which I
wrote the Children’s Audio Tour and co-wrote the Adult Audio
Tour. And while in Canberra I did some archival research for one of those possible, way-in-the-future
projects.
Also in September I was part of the Rose Scott Women
Writers’ Festival in Sydney with The Book of Thistles. On a fantastic
panel with fellow writers Vanessa Berry, Kim Mahood and Ashley Hay. And around
that same time, my ABC Radio National feature Seoul City Sue won
the 2018 AWGIE Award for Radio. If you’re interested you can download the
program here.
In November Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue opened at
the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith. The commission was inspired
by the history of the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest at Emu
Plains. It was a really good process with a couple of workshops along the way before
the play was brought to vibrant life by director Nick Atkins, actors Adam Booth
and Kate Worsley and cellist/composer Me-Lee Hay. More info here.
Currency Press published Good With Maps and Teacup
in a Storm in a two-play edition with an intro by Dr Laura Ginters
from Sydney Uni. And in October/November Critical Stages toured Good With
Maps through NSW where it was enthusiastically received by regional
audiences.
What else? I wrote a draft of a new play and I did a 9-week
Latin language class. So: felix sit annus novus 2019, which if I’ve got it
right means Happy New Year!
VERITY
The last six months have been business-as-usual for me,
which is to say continuing to work on my doctorate at Flinders University. I’m
at the business-end of it now, with (hopefully) something less than one year to
go.
I presented at the ADSA conference in Melbourne in June,
talking about the interview process in its various incarnations in
verbatim-related work. And I have undertaken
a number of other such presentations here at home in Adelaide.
A great pleasure was the publication in August of my script
for Long Tan, by Currency, with a
typically incisive and generous introduction by Julian Meyrick.
I also held a reading at Flinders thanks to the glorious
help of Rosalba Clemente and Tom Healey and year 4 graduating students of the
play I’m writing for the doctorate, Bloodlines:
a Polish Memory. It was enormously helpful to hear my monster of a piece out
loud. I’m two drafts down now and who knows how many to come.
I have been thinking about the art and craft of playwriting
itself a great deal, in part due to the pleasure and necessity to interview
what the academic world calls Australian ‘creative practitioners’ and the rest
of the world calls ‘playwrights’. I have been so impressed by the clever,
insightful, thoughtful comrades who have made themselves available to talk to
me in depth, not to mention the pleasure of reading so many good plays in preparation.
And I’ve been
engaging in a little dramaturgy on the side, one of those times when the job is
a pleasure.
When I write it down it looks like a fallow period. In fact,
it’s been anything but. One of the things I’ve also been researching is the process
of creativity itself with its highs and lows, and comings and goings and
iterations of active and passive. That’s where I’m at now—some sort of liminal
space. It’s okay, but it’ll be quite nice quite soon to come up for some air.
NED
My God! It’s that time of year already. The end of year
wrap. And what a year it’s been.
I’ve become a grandfather. Nothing can top that.
I shepherded 100 Year 12 students through the HSC and,
together with my life partner, enjoyed the highs and lows of my daughter’s
assault on the HSC. Shepherding Year 12 made me question whether the amount of
anxiety the whole thing causes is worth it in the end. Fortunately for us, our
daughter handled the whole thing magnificently. Others were not so lucky.
I can’t separate my personal from my writing life. They are
inextricably linked. The only way I can write is to find time between life’s
demands. Working full time as teacher doesn’t leave a lot of spare time.
Especially with 100 Year 12s to care for. What it does do, however, is make you
very organised. I’m not the first writer to have a full time job. What I have
(finally) learnt to do is to compartmentalise whatever I am doing. Back when I
was writing for Bell Shakespeare
I used to disappear to Lou Jack’s whenever I had a few periods off and
work on the pieces I was commissioned to write. There is no way I can do that
now. This teaching gig is too intense and I can’t dip in and out of my novel
the way I could dip in and out of Actors
at Work scripts. So, it’s been weekends in the Balmain Library putting in
long sessions and school holidays. While the rest of the family went away I
stayed home and worked on my book.
At about the time of the last wrap I finished a draft of Damascus. I spoke to a literary agent
about it. When she asked me how many words, I said: ‘200,000.’
There was a long silence: ‘200,000?’
‘Yessss … ’
‘You’ve written two books.’
‘Oh.’
There was a pause: ‘You’re not Richard Franklin.’
‘No. I’m not. How many words should it be?’
‘I don’t know—80, 90,000.’
‘Oh.’
She gave me the name of an editor. We had a very similar
conversation. I’ve never written a novel before. I didn’t have a clue. There
was one positive, however. They both thought it was a good story. You can probs
guess the rest. I’ve spent the last six months editing 200,000 words down to
90,000. The surprising bit is I’ve really enjoyed it. I discovered (surprise,
surprise) that a lot of it was repetitive and, frankly, pretty boring. Lots of
detail that might have been fascinating for me but would have bored the pants
off anyone else. The REALLY good bit is, just before Xmas I finished. Yep. I
whittled 200,000 down to 90,000. When I told my editor she said: ‘Wow! That’s
an achievement.’ That was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me
about my writing.
I packed my bags and headed off to New York to visit my
granddaughter. My daughter smashed the HSC and my 100 Year 12s got what they
deserved.
Now for 2019.
CATH
I’ll be brief. I’ll try. I am writing but I don’t want to go
on about it at the moment.
Yes, it has finally happened, I’ve become uncharacteristically
superstitious about where I am up to with my new play. This is the play I have
received support from Playwriting Australia’s Duologue Program and I am working
with the playwright Alison Lyssa as dramaturg. I’ve blogged about this program
late last year so scroll down to know more …
Here’s a pic of my lucky busted writing lamp—at least I hope
it is.
I’m also building on another project which is resolving
itself literally in my dreams. I’d tell you more but again for superstitious
reasons I don’t want it let out into the world quite yet.
Finally, here’s a painting of mine called Bloom (oil
on linen) shortlisted recently for the Green Way Art Prize. As Picasso
pronounced, ‘I don’t paint nature, I am nature’. Well he would say that
wouldn’t he?? Oblivious to the fact that we are all nature.
And that’s me for the moment.
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