First up, a bit of shameless
promotion: A reading of
Good With Maps on 24 June at 5:00 pm at the Griffin Theatre.
Good With Maps at is one of my monologues-cum-performance
essays. I wrote it for myself to present—which I have done, and will continue
to do. But I'm also interested in exploring the possibility of the piece having
a double life, hence this
Parnassus Den reading, directed by Kate Gaul, with
actor Heather Mitchell reading the work. Here’s some info about the piece:
When the world map was full of gaps, the Amazon topped the
list of places unknown to western explorers. In 2012 are there any ‘unknowns’
left? On a trip to the Amazon, the writer ponders this and other questions as
she struggles to deal with her father’s journey through Parkinson’s disease
towards what is perhaps our last great unknown. If that makes Good with Maps
sound grim, it’s not. Yes, it’s sad and confronting in parts, but it’s also
funny and thoughtful and celebrates the power of reading and literature to transport
us to places both real and imagined.
Moving on … yes, they’ve shifted them to the State Library,
but the only real change I could see in the allegedly revamped
NSW Premier’s Literary Awards was that the price tag had jumped to $100 per entry. In many, maybe most cases, this fee will be paid by the writers. Sigh. Also on the matter of revamped awards, this time the
Richard Burton Award. I’ve been thinking about this full-length play produced in
the last 3 years to be eligible thing, and what it says. And I think it
says: hey, we’re sticking with the status quo, we’re happy with the status quo; we’re only interested in the same writers as everyone else, the writers
other companies are already programming and producing. Not only that, but if you unpack
that requirement a bit more, it gets worse. Given all the current discussion about the
under-representation of women playwrights and how hard it is for them to get
their work on (not to mention other 'diversities' we see far too little of on
our stages), then to have this last 3-years thing is not only going along with
the status quo, but actually compounding it!
On a happier note, I saw
Lachlan Philpott’s Truck Stop the other week.
What a great piece of writing it is. (I really liked the direction too.) Tight,
terse, deftly structured, it mashes down-to-earth teenage sound-bytes with the
poetry of theatre. If I were a judge, I’d have given it a
playwriting prize, no question.
Noëlle
