Image by Geoff Sirmai
In celebration and recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8th, Week Five of the Short + Sweet Theatre Festival was all about platforming women’s voices and work. Both the Wildcard and the Top 80 plays featured short plays written and/or directed by women and many focusing on issued concerning women in our society.
Image by Matthew Abotomey
Catastrophic climate change is an inevitable reality and we’ve been biding our time for decades. Some people in society choose denial and avoidance and others, like the guerrilla gardeners, are choosing revolution. When Kat stumbles into their plans, they plant the seed for her to change her life.
Image by Rob Studdert
A group of friends gather every once in a while to reconnect with each other over a game of Monopoly. They have different jobs, money and housing situations, and life goals but all of that is put aside for the game. On this night, however, a new player joins the friends and shifts the group dynamics perhaps permanently.
Image by Clare Hawley
Being queer in a cis-sexist and heteronormative world means a near constant string of coming out situations when you’re placed in the position to correct other people’s assumptions about you. Some coming outs resonate more throughout a lifetime, like with parents or close friends, but that doesn’t make any coming out easy. Here we see 37 different coming out moments through 12 actors and their 94 characters.
Image by Robert Catto
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a piece of the queer canon for the way it depicts the state of America, specifically New York, during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Tony Kushner’s remarkable script overlaps the lives of five gay men and their families, nurses, coworkers, and neighbours over two parts, approximately six and a half hours of stage time, while also establishing these stories deeply within the political, economic, and social framing of the Reagan years.
Sydney’s Short + Sweet Theatre Festival brings together groups of writers, directors, and performers to put on dozens of ten minute plays over eight weeks. Each of those weeks sees a selection of Wildcard plays and Top 80 plays compete for audience, judges, and crew votes to put their work through to the semi-finals and, eventually, the top of the Short + Sweet podium.
Image by Clare Hawley
Four people enter a supermarket like any ordinary Tuesday. To their shopping trips they bring the baggage of their families, problems, and personalities. Soon they will share the connection of witnessing a violent attack but, for now, they wander the aisles and think to themselves.
Image by Dawn Pugh
Based on the real events of a student invading the home of Germaine Greer, The Female of the Species sets past, present, and future feminists against each other to find the reckoning point between theory and practise.
Metamorphosis was a seminal text from Franz Kafka, one of the most important writers of the 20th century. It depicts young Gregor, a son working to support his poor family, who wakes up one morning to discover he has become a cockroach. This production of the stage adaptation by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson shifts the dire and dreary tone of Kafka’s novella to something more dramatic.
Image by Jamie Williams
On the cusp of World War I, a young soldier is invited to Baron Kekesfalva’s castle for a party. After embarrassing himself by asking the Baron’s paralysed daughter to dance, Anton Hofmiller attempts to apologise and sets in motion his entanglement with this sad and unusual family. This joint production between Schaubühne Berlin and Complicité based on the Austrian novel by Stefan Zweig is a dark and arresting examination of the rotting influence of pity on a life and its relationships.
Night Writes 