Year: 2019

GLORIA is a play by one of the rising ‘stars’ of playwriting in the United States: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. His writing has garnished many literature Nominations and Awards: WAR (2014), APPROPRIATE (2014), AN OCTOROON (2014), EVERYBODY (2017), GLORIA (2018). GLORIA, is set in a magazine office, where a group of aspiring young writers are working in jobs that are unexciting, perhaps even deadening: Ani (Annabel Harte), Miles (Justin Amankwah), Dean (Rowan Witt), Kendra (Michelle Ny), Lorin (Reza Momenzada) and Gloria (Georgina Symes). They fill out their day at their desks with their menial tasks, laced, some might say, enhanced, by bored…

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES, with Music by Claudio Monteverdi, using a Libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, was first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Pacio in Venice in the 1639 – 40 Carnival Season. The opera was rarely performed until the late 20th Century and the work has been reconstructed from many sources. This Pinchgut Opera production has been laboured over by the Artistic Director and Conductor, Erin Helyard, utilising the Orchestra of the Antipodes, with guest artists Fernando Guimaraes, performing Ulysses and Catherine Carby as his patient wife, Penelope. The work originates from the final chapters of Homer’s THE…

ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE, is a play by English writer, Alice Birch. REVOLT SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN was seen at Old 505 and her screenplay LADY MACBETH (2016) heralds a fearless writer examining the place and role of women in the world. ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE, places three women, Carol (Anna Samson), Anna (Andrea Demetriades) and Bonnie (Kate Skinner) on stage side-by-side in front of a spacious house which all three live in. The play unwinds with the three women speaking at the same time or separately, supported by a collection of seven other actors: Danielle Catanzariti, Jack Crumlin, Teale Howie,…

Trevor (Jamie Oxenbould) is a 200 pound chimpanzee, adopted and kept by Sandra (Di Adams), in her home. She is a single ‘parent’, her husband having deserted the home front. Trevor has had a limited ‘career’ in the entertainment industry with his appearance on a talk show starring Morgan Fairchild (Eloise Snape), a one-time soapy star. In this play by American writer, Nick Jones – mostly television;ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, GLOW – Trevor has an anthropomorphic relationship with us, the audience, as he confides to us his view of his life’s given circumstances – his growing frustration with the…

PRIME FACIE, is a one hundred-minute, one person play, by Suzie Miller. It won the Griffin Award for Best Play in 2018. Tessa is a feisty young woman from a working class background who finds her talent in the practice of Law. In the journey of this play Tessa experiences what it is to be on both sides of the incidents of the court system. It becomes a devastating revelation. Suzie Miller is a writer who has practised in Law to subsidise her first love: writing. Many a writer, especially the Australian writer, with this country’s limited opportunities to be…

Alana Valentine, the writer, notes in the program: Weight bias is a pervasive and destructive form of discrimination. Shaming and bullying people who are living in large bodies is common, callous and counter-productive to their life and health. But equally problematic is an attitude which advocates that people living in large bodies should just be left to their own devices, that when they ask for support and advice they should be ignored. Tim Jones, the Director of this project, is also the Artistic Director/General Manager of the Seymour Centre and as part of his mission in those positions has determined…