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  Supporting Australian Script Writing since 1994

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Monthly readings of new Australian plays

Darlinghurst Theatre, 19 Greenknowe Avenue Potts Point Sydney

 Monday nights each month @ 7.30PM Tickets $10/$8 PD members (available at box office) 

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

Monday 20 July 2009 @ 7.30pm

Across the Water - a play by Noel Hodda

Watch this space fro more details!

PREVIOUS READINGS AT PD IN 2009 (below)

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.

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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.

 

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