In the Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about the sudden death of her husband, Joan Didion writes, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Grief is figured as a foreign, unknowable place that welcomes unsuspecting grievers like Frank after tragedy. Frank isn’t sure how he got here or how to get home but he’s slowly piecing together the puzzle of his grief.
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A woman turns to the police for assistance when her husband assaults her. The police take the opportunity to puff their chests and wield their power. David Williamson’s the Removalists is exemplary of the playwright’s successes and shortcomings in a brutal, violent exploration of power and toxic masculinity.
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Desire and power: it’s a tale as old as time played out countlessly in the artist/muse dynamic. “Symphonie fantastique” by Hector Berlioz is one such example of a multi-layered attempt to capture the fluttering beauty of unrequited love. Using this 19th century composition as the inspiration, Little Eggs Collective inject some queer imaginary and disco fever for a hallucinatory story of revenge.
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Image by Clare Hawley
A boy wants to become a composer but his controlling father forbids it and so he runs away, changing the course of not only his own life but that of his lover and their undetected unborn son. Adapted from the middle grade novel by Jamila Gavin, Coram Boy dives into 17th century England to explore class divides, the Baroque music scene, and the underbelly of the human trafficking industry.
Image by Yure Covich
In the modern world, where it seems chaos reigns, the indeterminacy of the future can have many people clinging to the certainty of discrimination, exclusion, and hatred tighter than ever before. For loyalist Protestant Eric, the trauma of a past broken by terrorism and fear collides with the intimidating future of freedom and unlimited possibilities with devastating effects.
Night Writes 