I want to recommend Perishable Theatre’s International Women’s Playwriting festival, here in Providence, RI. Well worth applying! Deadline May 15. My friend and colleague Mireille Juchau once sent a play from Australia and it won and she came over for the Festival… and many other fabulous writers have had work produced in this festival, including Alice Tuan, Trista Baldwin, Jenifer Haley, Molly Rice, Bridget Carpenter and many others. I know I talk about Perishable a lot, but I have had great experiences there– Perishable premiered my crazy play WEIGHTLESS last October to excellent reviews and houses; and twice they’ve produced my shorter plays as part of—yes, the Women’s Playwriting Festival. It’s a great way to see work on its feet in front of an audience—and dear playwrights, it’s not a staged reading. It’s a real, if bare-bones, production.
Mark Twain once said something to the effect that a man who picks up a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way; and I think the same is true for playwrights of production. So, fabulous women writers… dust off those plays (or even better, write a new one) and send ‘em in!
I wonder sometimes if seven years in the US hasn’t worked some spell on me. . . I think of Psyche’s tasks in the underworld, and that seven years is a magic number of sorts. From which the view back to the home country recedes into brightly colored imagistic memory-fragments, with voices grown strange like a bad phone-echo. Sometimes when I hear other Australians speak, it’s a real shock and I hear the accent that was previously, like water, just my fish-medium. But then—double shock–an American voice after an Australian one jars my ear the other way. My voice when I think to myself (not out loud) is Australian, but it no longer belongs to Australia. It sounds the way someone who speaks like nobody around her sounds, and I feel uncomfortable back with my own sonic flock.
I just read this on Alison Croggon’s blog (Melbourne theatre critic & poet). It resonates strongly with me—her articulation of being affected in a visceral way by theatre first; and figuring out the hows and whys later. I know that feeling of breathing in a room with other people where breath is the held thread between performance and audience, and questions of how and why a piece “works” come after the physical sensation of connection, involvment, disturbance. . .
Long ago in the when of my other life in Sydney I saw a beautiful piece, Andree Greenwell’s musical adaptation of Mary Fallon’s work (Laquiem) where spoken text and sung was mingled. Clare Grant (whose whisky and gravel voice I love) read some of the text and listening, I had a strong feeling of a space opening inside my own body, a large echoic space that the words/ sound were simultaneously creating and inhabiting. This feeling—the opening of a space larger than the space it fits inside of, the body it co-expresses—is what I live for in the theatre, yet it’s ineffable and can’t be predicted.
I just heard through NoPassport of Diane Lefer, who has also written a non-realist play set in an immigration detention center (my play on that theme, also non-realist but set in Australia, not the US is called Slow Falling Bird; hers is Termitary).
I’m interested in what I’m perceiving as a quiet groundswell of non-naturalistic and poetic approaches to writing politically engaged theatre, especially in a time when the loudest drums we hear are those of testimony and more journalistic approaches to the theatre. Another play I’ve encountered recently is Ken Prestininzi’s wonderful As American As (scroll down to find his play) which makes the landscape of terrorism and the rhetoric of Homeland Security truly unheimlich-–a US torture black site is “outsourced” to a mid-western family’s basement, and daily life goes on… not quite as usual.
I’m tired of the fetish of the verbatim, especially in the theater, and the notion that because someone said it, it’s true (brilliantly lampooned –and more–by Eliot Weinberger in his 2003 prose poem, What I Heard About Iraq. ) The most interesting thing about My Name is Rachel Corrie (and yes, I did go see it in NY) was that NYTW canceled its production, thereby igniting a public debate about censorship in the theatre, and the difficulties of presenting work that deals with a Palestinian point of view in the U.S..
All speech is shaped by context and all public speech is–in more than one sense—already framed. I AM interested in verbatim as a tool of art, not a fetish of authenticity—in the same way that I think art that uses found objects trails their materiality in with it.
