WORKS IN PROGRESS

An adaptation for the stage of the novel The Mind of a Deviant Woman, by American author Paula Paul. The play centres on the story of Carrie Buck, a teenage girl who in 1920s Virginia was used by the eugenics movement in a court case to legalise the forced sterilisation of ‘the unfit’. The criteria for ‘fitness’ were wildly biased, according to race, class, disability, and the prevailing morality of the day. 60,000 Americans were sterilised without their consent (or often, their knowledge); the Nazis cited the US Supreme Court’s decision in their defence at Nuremberg. It is yet to be overturned.

Find out more here.

Commissioned by Michael Dengler of Exit Game Productions.

A musical fantasia inspired by Cole’s Funny Picture Book, the enduringly popular 19^th century publication from Melbourne bookseller E.W. Cole. The show is a gift to an imaginative director and design team, drawing in the first half on the gilded ornateness of Victorian music halls, and in the second becoming the stuff of a Dickensian nightmare.

International film star, queen of vaudeville, champion swimmer, pioneering health & fitness guru, trail-blazing entrepreneur, female action hero, Hollywood’s highest-earning actor…

Annette Kellerman (1887-1975) was an expert manipulator of the media and creator of her own mythology. She caused sensation from her home in Sydney to the world stage, yet she has been virtually erased from history. Marrickville Mermaid restores her to her rightful place via a highly original work of music theatre. It is a vehicle for a star performer whose range runs from cabaret to classical.