After the reading, the audience members give their thoughts and comments on the script giving the writer invaluable feedback.

Monday 20 September 2010 @ 7.30pm - The Beautiful Black Snake

a new Australian play by Alana Valentine

Monday 16 August 2010 @ 7.30pm - A Knife Dream - a new Australian play by Jonathan Ari Lander

Cast: Shauntelle Benjamin, Peter Carmody, Anna Housten, Matthew Okine and Karen Vickery

Directed by Anthony Skuse

A Knife Dream has been developed with the support for the Griffin Theatre Company.

The Island of Borneo, British Sarawak, 1948.  An aging mansion on the edge of a rubber plantation. The Malay workers have fled.  Indonesia is in the throes of violent revolution as the Dutch battle to maintain control of their former colony.  The old world of European empires is crumbling...   

Elizabeth Weston, the aging matriarch of a wealthy family has remained in her crumbling mansion with her daughter Alice and her two African servants, Mugo and Ani. Ani and Mugo are Elizabeth’s workers and they are also her new children.  She renames them, teaches them how to dress and read and play the piano, she makes their world, her world.  And yet Elizabeth is helpless without them…

Gunshots are heard in the distance....War is coming...And a dark fantasy is stirring in Mugo’s heart, the chance to enact his revenge upon the European world which mocks and humiliates him...

JONATHAN ARI LANDER is a Sydney based playwright who lectures and tutors at UNSW.  In 2008 Ari won the Max Afford Award for Revolution.  Revolution was presented at the 2009 National Play Festival in Hobart.  Ari was a 2008/2009 resident playwright at the Griffin Theatre Company.  A Knife Dream was commission as part of his residency and was read by the Griffin Theatre in May 2010.  His short play Measure was part of the 2009 cycle of short plays at the Griffin Theatre and was published in the anthology Short Circuits by Currency Press.  Measure was subsequently included in the Brand Spanking New Season at the New Theatre in 2009.  His play Redemption was part of the 2010 Old Fitzroy Theatre season in Woolloomooloo.  Ezekiel's Song was selected for Theatre@Risk's Festival of New Works and was short-listed for the 2009 Rodney Seaborn Award and was co-winner of the 2009 St Martin’s Young Playwright’s Award.  The play will be presented in a reading by St Martin’s at the end of 2010.  Lander is a graduate of the 2001 NIDA Playwright’s Studio.

Monday 19 July 2010 @ 7.30pm

As I Lay Dreaming - a new Australian play by Catherine McKinnon

Cast: Zoe Coyle, Sam Haft, Owen Little, Kate Lofting, Graeme McRae, Daniel Milne, Suzanne Pereira, Matilda Ridgway, Lotte St Clair & Lisa Warczak

Directed by Joseph Uchitel

A group of friends gather by the river to remember a companion who drowned ten years earlier. They find that the river is a meeting place for others: nearby a student argues with his sister; three school kids smoke stolen cigarettes; two men wait for their partner in crime; a lone footballer looks for thrills; and two young lovers indulge in a drinking bout.
Some of those gathered on the river’s banks meet up with strangers, others with friends, one with a ghost, but all feel the draw of the mysterious river.
As I Lay Dreaming interweaves the stories of several people, all linked by the events of one night. It is a play about the awkwardness of new beginnings and the suddenness of endings, about love’s strange currents, and about how one small event can change the course of our lives forever.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Rodney Seaborn Award

Catherine McKinnon studied at Flinders University Drama Centre and was a founding member of Red Shed Theatre Company. For nine years she worked for the Shed as writer, director, and co-artistic director. She directed, and with company members, helped develop, many new Australian plays. Her own plays for the Shed are: Immaculate Deceptions, A Rose By Any Other Name, Road to Mindanao, and Eye of Another. During this time she directed several contemporary plays for the State Theatre Company of SA. After leaving Adelaide she completed a Masters in Creative Writing at UTS Sydney. In 2006 she won the Penguin/Woman’s Weekly short story award. In 2008, her first novel, The Nearly Happy Family, was published by Penguin, with a second edition released in May 2009. Currently she is working on her second novel, I Am Tree, and three plays, Tilt, As I Lay Dreaming and Alex, Kelly, and Dominic

Monday 19 April 2010 @ 7.30pm

Lies, Love and Hitler - a new Australian play by Elizabeth Scott

Cast: David Callan, Martin Crewes & Samantha Turner

Directed by Laurence Coy

Dr Paul Langley, age 39, is slightly mad. It’s not that he doesn’t have a good brain – like most academics, he has a very good brain – it’s just that he thinks he’s a little out of whack... mainly because he keeps seeing visions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dead man whose life and work he’s been studying for years.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his role in a plot to kill Hitler. Langley is baffled how Bonhoeffer – a theologian like himself – could make the ideological leap from pacifism to tyrannicide in one fell swoop.
Langley finds himself in trouble when he falls for one of his students, Hannah Summers. Things become complicated when it’s discovered Hannah has a secret which threatens to destroy them both. Bonhoeffer walks Langley through his inner conflict, and Langley learns why, in morally ambiguous circumstances, it’s sometimes necessary to risk everything for a better future.

Elizabeth Avery Scott began her working career in journalism but now finds she is variously employed as playwright, mother, businesswoman and wife (in no particular order). In 2009 she completed a Master of Arts Practice in scriptwriting with Charles Sturt University; that same year an early version of her play Lies, Love and Hitler (submitted under the title My Own Private Bonhoeffer) was shortlisted for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award. Her other full-length play, A Tree in the Forest, was produced at a festival in 2004. Elizabeth is currently Managing Director of Canberra Academy of Dramatic Art (CADA), the ACT’s leading drama school. Her spare time is spent dreaming up new plays and wishing she had time to paint. She lives in Canberra with her husband James, her three children, Anastasia, Caspian and Leo, an old kelpie called Sophie, and a couple of unattractive hermit crabs.

***First Reading of 2010***

Monday 22 March 2010 @ 7.30pm

Speak English or Die - a new Australian play by Jeremy Johnson

Cast: Don Christopher, Marissa Dikkenberg, Aimee Pedersen, Don Reid and Hazem Shammas

A Humanities Professor, Jim Chaplin, is minding his daughter’s Interior Decorating shop, a business specializing in carpets and wares from Morocco and Samarqand. His Daughter, Mouche, is on a job in Melbourne for the day. Jim strikes up a friendship with Ali, a Muslim electrician rewiring the shop where they debate the merits of atheism over religious dogma. When Mouche and her boyfriend, Dan, return from the airport an immediate spark ignites between Ali and Mouche, even though Ali himself is engaged to be married.  Mouche then accepts a bet from her best friend and business partner, Naomi, to inebriate and seduce Ali, giving her 24 hours to accomplish the feat. The repercussions from ensuing events turn inside out the lives of everyone around them.

PREVIOUS READINGS AT PD IN 2009 (below)

Final reading for 2009!

Monday 14 December 2009 @ 7.30pm

Glace Chase in Last Night's Beauty Queen - a new Australian one person show

Directed by Christopher Hurrell

Join acclaimed (and infamous!) ex-child star Glace Chase in an informal “work in progress” showing of his Mardi Gras bound performance, as he reminisces over his salad days at the inaugural Li’l Mr Celebrity USA beauty pageant. Expect handy hints and warped logic as Glace coddles, probes and pulls all those who crave to be a beauty queen, rock star or porn star, but still can’t get there.

Glace Chase was created by Rick Viede, whose Griffin Award winning play Whore appeared at B Sharp and the Public Theater (NYC) this year. Rick also has commissions with Bell Shakespeare and has recently been awarded an Australia Council grant to write two new plays.
 
“Had me eating the carpet with laughter” Sx
“You’ve been warned!” The Age

Monday 16 November 2009 @ 7.30pm

Monday 19 October 2009 @ 7.30pm

Reeds of Innocence - a new Australian play by Nuala Higgins

Cast: Nick Cook, Sam Haft, Jonathan Hardy, Julie Hudspeth, Matt Minto & Kate Worsley

Directed by Dave Letch

There’s nothing darker than an Irishman’s heart/regret/dreams...

Thornton has always lived under the cloud of his clever older brother Theo and nothing in his life seems to be going right. He might be following in his father’s footsteps but that’s not how he wanted it to be. Theo and he had made a pact about escaping the family; but Theo broke it, leaving an unwilling Thorn to step into his shoes. Theo has gone to America and an exciting job in journalism and is travelling all around the States, much to the delight of his da and his family. But Thorn’s not so happy. He can’t let it rest.

Edward, proud da of Theo, has never quite recovered from the death of Mae; but he is a generous man and has taught Thornton his trade, building. But Thorn is sharp like his name, and rips and tears at those closest to him; his ailing father, his unaware younger brother, and the housekeeper brought into the family after Mae died. And there is nothing sharper than the tongue of a vengeful child.

Told with black humour and backed by a complex naturalism Nuala Higgins’ eye for detail puts theblack Irish sensibilities of this family firmly under the microscope. With power and a truthful muscularity we watch Thorn’s despair tear his family to shreds. From the first moment of denying his younger brother the results of his football match, Thorn’s on a trajectory of denial, mistrust and despair.

Nuala Higgins - Nuala was born in New York to Irish parents, the first of a family of 4 daughters, and grew up in Dublin. She was educated in Ireland, taking a bachelors degree in Biochemistry from the National University of Ireland, and returned to America where she studied for a masters degree in Forensic Science in Washington, before working for the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York.  Back in Dublin she worked as an administrator at University College Dublin, where she started to write plays and short stories that reflected her Irish experiences of family and culture. A decade or so ago, she moved to Sydney where she married, had a daughter, and continued to earn her daily living in administration whilst she progressed her play writing. This is her third play to have a rehearsed reading at Parnassus Den, the others being “Newton’s Cradle”, and “Shafted”

Monday 21 September 2009 @ 7.30pm - The Schelling Point by Ron Elisha

Cast: David Callan, Laurence Coy, Alan Flower, Nicholas Hope, Drayton Morley & Christopher Tomkinson

Directed by Sarah Goodes

What do John F. Kennedy, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Schelling, Peter Sellers and Frank Sinatra have in common?

Tom Schelling won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work in game theory. He began his career soon after World War II as an economist involved in the Marshall Plan.

By the late 50s and early 60s, he had become a widely respected nuclear strategist, whose connection with Robert McNamara (John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense) meant that his influence fed directly into White House policy. Many give him (and his work) credit for the US having averted all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  Some also credit him with having been instrumental in moving the US towards involvement in Vietnam.

At the time Schelling was publishing his work on nuclear strategy, an article he wrote for the London Observer was noticed by Stanley Kubrick.  Kubrick met with Schelling, and the idea for Dr Strangelove was born.

In a complex and disarming work that weaves its way between the world of realpolitik and the ‘reality’ of filmmaking, The Schelling Point explores the fanciful and ultimately romantic game theory notion that human behaviour is largely rational.

Using the Schelling Point – the point at which two parties who are unable to communicate can reach a common ground – as its focal point, the play undercuts the political landscape of the sixties with the personal crises of its protagonists, played out to the emotional rhythms of Sinatra’s unrepentant romanticism.

The result is a complex, funny, often moving and unsettling piece that challenges our notions of how the world really works.

Born in Jerusalem Ron Elisha's family moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1953. In 1975 he graduated in Medicine from Melbourne University and has practised as a GP since then. His first play, In Duty Bound was staged in 1979. Since then he has written dozens of plays, two children's books and occasional pieces for newspapers. He has won four Australian Writers' Guild Awards, including the Major Award in 1982 for his 1981 play Einstein. Among his most recent work is the 2005 play Wrongful Life, about the ethics of abortion and the law, and Renaissance which won Parnassus' Den's Mitch Mathews Award for best play in 2005 and was produced by Parnassus' Den at the Old Fitzroy Theatre in 2006.

Monday 29 June 2009 @ 7.30pm

Ezekiel's Song - a play by Jonathan Ari Lander

Cast: Camilla Ah Kin, Helmut Bakaitis, Katharine Cullen, Andy Cunningham, John Grinston, Stuart Katzen & Hazem Shammas

Directed by Michael Dahlstrom

Jerusalem 1996.  Shimon Peres is the Prime Minister and it is the eve of elections at the height of the Oslo Peace Process. It is a time of hope and great expectations that the peace process can solve the conflict in the Middle East. But good times are not destined to last for the Mintz family...Ezekiel is a young officer in the Israeli army; however his close friendship with Hassan, a Palestinian academic, could threaten to tear apart his family. The personal and the political collide in this new play about the tragic consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ezekiel’s Song was developed with the assistance of Theatre@Risk which presented an earlier draft of the play as part of their 2007 Festival of New Writing

JONATHAN ARI LANDER is currently completing his PhD in the school of History at UNSW.  He lectures and tutors on the subjects of Zionism, South East Asian History, Genocide studies and World History. He is currently a resident playwright at the Griffin Theatre Company.  In 2001, he was accepted into NIDA's Playwriting Studio. His play Broken Dreams was presented at Griffin Searchlight in 2005. In 2007, Ezekiel's Song was presented at Theatre@Risk's Festival of New Works. Ari won the Max Afford Award for Revolution, which was presented at the 2009 National Play Festival.

Monday 25 May 2009 @ 7.30pm

The Parricide - a play by Diane Stubbings

Cast: Sally Cahill, Matt Minto, Anthony Phelan, Tony Sloman & Linden Wilkinson

Crippled by debt and facing an impossible deadline, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky becomes obsessed with the idea of a son who murders his father. Against a background of violent revolution, The Parricide exposes the torment of a writer forced to choose between rebellion and repression, authority and chaos, passion and love.

Diane Stubbings is a graduate of the School of English at UNSW and the author of Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal, a work of literary criticism. She's long had a fascination with nineteenth-century Russian literature, and has been developing The Parricide, about the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, for three years, working under the guidance of playwright Timothy Daly. Diane has been shortlisted for the Ian Reed Prize for Radio Drama and highly commended in the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. She currently writes book reviews for The Canberra Times and is working on a play about personal and political responses to climate change. 

Directed by Dave Letch

Monday 6 April 2009 @ 7.30pm

I.D. a play by Jonathan Gavin

When the body of a young man is found on a riverbank, discovering who he was, and how and why he died, proves virtually impossible. 

Directed by Christopher Hurrell

Cast: Damien Ryan & Arky Michael

Jonathan Gavin is an actor and playwright. In 2004 he won the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award for his play A Moment On The Lips. It enjoyed two sell-out seasons in Sydney, one in Melbourne and another in Perth. Subsequently, the plays Suburban Epic and Special Occasions were commissioned by Company B Belvoir and Melbourne Theatre Company, respectively. In 2007, Tiger Country was produced by Maelstrom Productions as part of Griffin Stablemates.

(I.D. has been developed and is presented with the support of Griffin Theatre Company)

***First reading of 2009***

Monday 2 March 2009 @ 7.30pm

Redfern Heights - a play by Alana Valentine

Cast: Lynette Curran, Noel Hodda, Kim Knuckey, Kirk Page & Jane Phegan

Directed by Alex Galeazzi

The inner-city suburb of Redfern is constantly in the news but behind the drug-bust and riot headlines is a close-knit, lawful community struggling to make connections and forge lives of meaning and joyfulness. 'Redfern Heights' is a study of reconciliation forged through mutual hardship. Odile has had her bag snatched, Margaret has been hit by a car that did not stop. On one eventful night in the inner-city two women will come together through mutual hardship. They will reach across the divide of invasion and misunderstanding to cement a connection at once fragile and beautiful. Written as a kind of ‘verbatim in verse’, 'Redfern Heights' is a simple allegory for a personal and national identity in transition. It locates cultural contradiction squarely on the characters own doorstep and gives the reconciliation issue the immediacy and urgency of lived experience. It bypasses the piety, idealism, guilt and theorising and poses the dramatic question of what it is actually like to live side by side with people in abject and chronic poverty.