Photo by Dave Quinn

Sometimes, once in a while, there’s a play that falls into my inbox that completely opens up a new world. The world of the play is either fantasitical or familiar… and the language bubbles and delights or floats softly whispering to me through out the day. The new world of a new play sometimes beckons a new colleague and sometimes even a friendship.

Crushed is one of those plays.

I came across it in 2010, and two years on, and after a coffee, and a showing, and some time… I have lost touch (somewhat) with the play (which is now in the very capable and delightful hands of Erin Thomas) but not with the writer. And so it is with great anticipation I eagerly await the great reveal of Crushed next week at New Theatre.

Some may know that I did some of my growing (up) in a small town in country NSW and nearby was the town where I went to high school: Woolgoolga.

Some facts about Woolgoolga:

* The town billboards read:
“Woolgoolga: A hard name to say, a great place to stay” and “Woolgoolga: the missing piece of paradise.”

* Woolgoolga is surrounded by banana fields.

* The locals call it “Woopi.” When I lived there, I called it “hell.”

* Some of the Coffs Harbour high school kids referred to us as “Woopi scum” a friendly rivalry.

* There is a large sikh population – hence why there is a mini Taj Mahal and a Sikh Temple on the highway as you pass through from Coffs Harbour to Grafton.

* My parents still live in the house (north of Woolgoolga) I lived in as a teenager and it’s where I head to once a year (usually for 3 days) each Christmas.

* Woolgoolga had only one cafe worth visiting when I was a teen – called “Possums” – the ancient ladies would present you with a “mug of chino” with what I refer to as “country foam” (frothed milk that sits high and proud above the rim of the mug covered in brown dust (chocolate.))

I have very complex feelings about the place – associated with my teenage life… and so when asked by Melita to write about “Sweet Sixteen” I could only think of Woolgoolga…

Crushed is a complex and yet very familiar play for me and the thing that excited me the most was the feelings around homecoming and reunion. Pinter knows about coming home. So does Melita Rowston.

It’s been a few moons since Sydney last had one of her plays light up a stage and splash its light on the audience. So this production, in and of itself is a type of homecoming too.

So here is the blog that is my response to Rowston’s “homecoming” play.

http://crushedtheplay.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/bitter-sweet-sixteen-or-nirvana-in.html

DETAILS AND HOW TO BOOK
http://newtheatre.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=129

ABOUT THE SHOW
In the summer of 1988, ‘Sunny Girl’ Susie turned sweet sixteen. Her boyfriend Jason gave her a Poison t-shirt, her best friend Kelly gave her a name-necklace, and Kelly’s boyfriend Dazza gave her a handful of pills.

That night Susie Greene disappeared and was never seen again.

Twenty-two years later, the blood splattered t-shirt of the missing schoolgirl is unearthed in the scrub and Jason, Kelly and Dazza are brought back together for the bleakest of high school reunions. As the police uncover more evidence, Susie’s oldest friends are forced to confront their memories of a night they’d hoped to leave buried in their adolescence forever.

CRUSHED is a darkly humorous murder mystery/whodunit, a fast-paced, acerbic Gen X ride that drags the ‘lost child’ of Australian myth into the 21st century. This daring and imaginative play captures the spirit of the 80s with ironic hindsight and explores the sinister violence that lurks beneath the sun-bleached facade of Australia’s ‘she’ll be right’ culture.

New Theatre is very excited to be presenting this World premiere, in association with Chester Productions, as the first play for The Spare Room 2012 – our season of co-productions with three of Sydney’s leading independent companies.

Phone Bookings 1300 13 11 88 *$5.95 booking fee per transaction for phone bookings only

CREATIVE TEAM
Director Lucinda Gleeson | Producer Jennifer Campbell
Cast Sean Barker, Lucy Miller and Jeremy Waters
Set & Costume Designer Eliza McLean | Lighting Designer Richard Whitehouse | Sound Designer Shane Choi
Stage Manager/Operator Victor Areces | Dramaturg Erin Thomas | Photographer Ian Barry
PERFORMANCE TIMES: Tues – Sat @ 8pm, Sun @ 5pm

TICKET PRICES: Full $30 | Concession $25 | Groups (10+) $25 | Previews (16 & 17 May @ 8pm) $15 | Student Rush $17
Cheap Tuesdays – “Pay What You Can” $10 minimum (conditions apply)

RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes

Photo by Leah McGirr

It is an absolute thrill to watch the emergence of an artist – to be audience to their imagination and to feel the verve and excitement of their proliferating possibilities. Artslab is Shopfront’s residency program for artists under 25 -and it provides time, space, structure, support for a small group of artists to invest in, uncover, discover, delight in their own practice under the caring and skilled eyes of a range of professional artists. More about the program can be found here: http://artslab.shopfront.org.au/

For these artists this is a year of discovery and exploration, and I am absolutely excited to for them and I’m excited about them.

This is a small note of introduction…

Ava Karuso is a young playwright and improviser from Sydney.

Her first writing credit was the short play Spoons and Forks, performed and published in 2008. Since then her love of playwriting has grown, her most recent short play Guilt of the Vaudevillian was performed in the 2011 Short and Sweet festivals in Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast and Sydney. Ava was also part of the Australian Improv Team who travelled to Ottawa to perform in the Canadian Improv Games. She has studied improvisation with Impro Australia, Second City L.A. and iO West (Los Angeles). Ava is very interested in bringing improvisation and playwriting closer together and hopes to discover more about both fields in reflection of one another. She is particularly interested in using the ideas of improvisation and playwriting to explore the horror genre and find a way to bring true horror to the stage. Ava is greatly inspired by playwrights Edward Albee and Martin McDonough, and the darkly comic nature of her work reflects this. At the end of ArtsLab12, Ava hopes to have a stronger understanding of both her fields, as well as a new outlook on the art and capabilities of the theatre.

Tanya Thaweeskulchai is a writer who has recently branched out into the area of theatre and performance.

In 2011 Tanya was part of the PACT Ensemble and participated in a collaborative performance-making effort of Beguiled. She is currently undertaking her PhD in English (Creative Writing) at the University of New South Wales. Both her research project and her work with ArtsLab are geared towards her interest in the dynamics of words and sentences; the movement of their physical and aural qualities. Through the development of this poetry/performance script, she intends to push the spoken language and the language of the body to the extreme so that one might express what the other would not, thereby augmenting the divergences and convergences between them. By drawing upon the writings of Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari, Rilke and Sarah Kane, the project will negotiate the violence that is inherent the act of speaking, the decision not to speak, and the distortions that are created as a result of these encounters.

Sepy Baghaei is a theatre-maker with a penchant for creating work that places real material, collected from the everyday world, into the heightened theatrical realm. During ArtsLab12, Sepy is aiming to bring together her passion for devising and sound design to create a work that investigates the effect of found sound on an audience when placed in an isolated theatrical context.

Graduating with a Bachelor of Performance from the Australian Academy of Dramatic Art in 2011, Sepy has been exposed to a range of working processes under mentors such as Iain Sinclair, Anca Frankenhaeuser, Eddi Goodfellow and Andrew Davidson. She has also applied the skills of the Actor/Creator/Producer developed during her studies to a range of independent projects, creating work for the Sydney Fringe (2010-2011), the Mardi Gras Colour Blind Project (2011), and Adelaide Fringe (2012), in various capacities including director, performer and sound designer.

Khat Reid is an emerging artist working across various platforms including painting, drawing, performance, tattoo, and spiritual art. She recently completed a double degree with bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Performance Studies, with Honors at UNSW.

As a part of ArtsLab, Khat will be exploring the power of artificial hair. She will attempt to address the joys and woe’s one can experience in developing a relationship with one’s replacement hair. She will wrestle with everything from merkins to moustaches.

Pollyanna Nowicki is an emerging stage and screen actor with skills in physical theatre, singing and photography. She graduated from Sydney Theatre School in 2008 with an Advanced Diploma of Classical Acting and a Diploma of Theatre Performance. In 2009 she was awarded a Commendation for Acting from the Sunday Times NSDF Emerging Artist Awards for her performance in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Several performances and classes with Michael Pigott led to her first introduction to Shopfront Theatre in his show “242424″ – a 24-hour viewpoints experiment featuring 24 performers. Since then Pollyanna has been in and out of Shopfront watching her friends experience the ArtsLab residency. She continues to involve herself with experimental and hybrid theatre; most recently in Michal Imielski’s “How to Lose Sight” (Shh Theatre Company) – a location driven exploration into blind life – and Danielle O’Keefe’s dangerously different Romeo & Juliet, “Cursed Hearts”, (ATYP). Inspired by this kind of unconventional performance art, Pollyanna aims to explore interactive storytelling through performance, film and image, driven to create an experience that blurs the boundary between audience and performer. She decided to apply for ArtsLab12 because she too would like to discover more about the artist within.

Maria White is an emerging artist with a background in performance making. Maria generally works collaboratively as a performance maker (in the collective Friends WIth Deficits) and as as a curator (in the collective Groundwork). Groundwork will be curating the 2012 – 2013 Tiny Stadiums Festivals. In 2011, Maria completed a practice-based project with first class Honours at UNSW, under the supervision of Clare Grant and Bryoni Trezise. With Friends with Deficits, Maria has undertaken a mentorship with Clare Britton (of My Darling Patricia) through the Vacant Room program at PACT. Maria has performed at Underbelly Arts Festival, Next Wave, The Old Fitzroy Theatre, Under The Radar (Brisbane), PACT and The Red Rattler. This year she will be honing in on her interdisciplinary solo practice through the ArtsLab residency.

Maria’s idea is to research rituals of singing and the use of voice in different communities, whilst using that research to develop a project that may or may not look like a performance piece. Maria wants to explore hybrid art forms whilst drawing upon the camp, theatrical aesthetics of 20th Century musicals.

It was Summer in Toronto when I arrived in June 2004. I was there to start my new life. I had a backback, a note book and a cheeky sense of adventure. I had signed up to see as much of the Toronto Fringe Festival as possible – I was curious to see what was hot on the Northern side of the world. I booked for a two woman comedy act “Dick Whipped,” “Flavour of the Month,” a show I’ve forgotten the title of about Montezuma’s Revenge by playwright/director TJ Dawe – I was there to see as much Canadian content as I could. And whilst I was there a young man – with that look on his face that fringe artists have – pressed a flier into my hand.

Seven years later back in Australia – I met with Charles Ross the creator and performer behind both One Man Star Wars and The One Man Lord of the Rings to talk about his journey from Fringe to world stage…

He’s a nice guy (as Canadians often are) and I can’t wait to see his show at The Opera House this week….

First published on www.australianstage.com.au

Under lights, on stage, dressed only in overalls and some protective padding, Charles Ross is alone. No props, no sound effects. No actors to support him, just his voice, his body and his memory… that’s all that is needed to recreate a condensed version of two of the great epic film trilogies the world has ever seen.

In the grey suede armchairs of his Sydney hotel, he is mild, articulate and open about his work, about his career, his ideas, his ambition, his philosophy his background. And despite thousands of kilometers of air travel, hotel rooms and performances he is still surprised and humbled by the audience response to his work. Talking with him, it’s easy to see his how it is that epic solo narratives are attractive – he is himself on a journey of epic proportions – carving out a career of his own – from the Fringe in Toronto to Sydney’s Opera House which is based on playfulness, imagination and curiosity, “not unlike an 8 year old boy.”

Charles Ross met his long time collaborator, friend and director TJ Dawe, at University in Victoria, British Columbia Canada in 1994, when they were paired up to be Yoga partners. Now 17 years later, on the opposite side of the world, Ross is performing One Man Lord of The Rings directed by his good friend. As the creator and performer of One Man Star Wars, a show which has taken him all over the world and for which he has clocked up over 1200 performances.

Without the aid of any special effects, or theatrical effects, Ross transmogrifies into a vast myriad of characters harnessing the hydra-headed narratives of all three films in the Lord Of the Rings Trilogy in less than 70 minutes.

When asked how this all began – the origins seem to be that of a game of Frisbee with his drama school buddies, punctuated with beer and impressions of characters from The Star Wars Trilogies. After graduation Ross and his friends performed in several shows – large casts and production values which chewed through the budget. “There just wasn’t any money, it seemed the shows that were doing a lot better and able to cover their expenses were one person shows.”

Later, in 2000 when he presented a script to three friends, “they didn’t really know what to do with it, so I started to show them, and they said ’why don’t you do it?’” So as a part of a small variety show Charles performed a 25 minute extract, “which was clearly the most successful show of the night, and so I expanded it to a show I could play at the Fringe. Fringe format is one hour, so 60 minutes, 3 movies, that’s 20 minutes a movie – a one hour show. It made sense. So I did it and for some reason people liked it.”

If Ross was surprised that this show had such audience appeal, why did he want to do this show? “I got sick of auditioning and always getting work as cast as the ingénue or the boring characters. I wanted to do a show that would show that I could do interesting characters, that I could be funny. I didn’t think it would define my career and take over Star Wars has been going for a decade now. It was meant to be a stepping stone but it’s been a very large stepping stone.”

One Man Star Wars was greeted with popular and critical acclaim, and Ross was even invited perform at Lucas Film’s Star Wars Convention. The story of creation and development of The One Man Lord of the Rings is slightly different. One night when Ross was performing the show, “ Ian McKellen of his own doing attended, sitting in the second row. Afterwards I was in the shower when I had a knock on the door saying Ian McKellan wants to meet you, so I got out of the shower and met him. We talked for about an hour and at lunch there was this photographer documenting what McKellen does. And very shortly after that I received a cease and desist letter from the people who take care of licensing for Tolkien’s Estate… more inviting me to get a license. So one year and $20,000 later Peter Jackson hasn’t seen it yet – but I’m looking to change that while I ‘m down here.”

And this was And so does he miss the group camaraderie of a theatre production? Do you miss the creative support of a full cast?
“I’d love to go back to not having to carry the whole show – but perhaps I’ve been such an ego maniac and I have been for such a long time that I wouldn’t want to give up all the applause for myself.” There’s a smile.

So what is next for the man who holds all those stories and characters within him? Where do you go once you’ve been at the top of the world’s greatest one man show phenomenon? “I don’t want to be 65 and still doing the One Man Star Wars, though I might want to do that once. I don’t want to be the one Man brand.. it’s a myopic way to look at it. I’m really interested in writing and telling stories, only because as I am getting older – I’m really interested to do what I wanted to do when I was a kid which is to see my ideas in my head produced and made reality. If I can invent something I can have a chance to have a little tidbit role in it. That’s great. I don’t want to have complete control but I would like to create a role that can draw people in and make something new.”

“Think big. Why not? The very worst that happens is nothing and the best that happens is something. So you can choose to join the ranks with those who are too afraid to even try or you can see what happens. And even if it is a massive failure. I’d rather want to be a massive failure than someone who never even tried – which really is a definition of failure anyway. “

There is a daring, a playfulness and yet a great intelligence and a humbleness in Charles Ross that makes his journey all the more impressive.