Black Swan State Theatre Company launches 2013 Season
In its third year at its new home, last night The Black Swan State Theatre Company launched its 2013 program. After announcing a cut back in 2012 Black Swan returns with a seven play season that includes a return to the Studio Underground.
Opening the season in the Heath Ledger Theatre is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest staring comedian Pete Rowsthorn, better known for his role as Brett Craig in the Australian comedy Kath and Kim. Considered one of the greatest American plays of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman completes the classical choices for the 2013 season.
Premiers include Joanna Murray-Smith’s comedy Day One, A Hotel, Evening. John Howard returns to Perth to star in Tim Winton’s third play Shrine. Shrine continues to showcase the West Australian landscape and its inhabitants following on from Winton’s previous success, Rising Water and Signs of Life. Completing the premiers is Midsummer (A play with songs) ,by David Greig & Gordon McIntyre and staring channel Ten’s I Will Survive contestant Brendon Hanson.
Rounding off the season are the Tony nominated plays Other Desert Cities and The Motherf***er with the Hat which will play in The Studio Underground.
Black Swan State Theatre Company 2013 Season
Heath Ledger Theatre
The Importance of Being Earnest
9 – 28 March
In Oscar Wilde’s most famous play, the dandy Algernon and dapper Jack are best friends, who, unbeknownst to each other, both employ different identities in London and the countryside. When Jack proposes to Algernon’s cousin Gwendolen, and Algernon falls for Jack’s ward Cecily, both do so using the pseudonym Ernest.Amidst mistaken identities and giddy confusion towers Gwendolen’s mother, the imposing Lady Bracknell, as a paragon of Edwardian propriety, who refuses to be anything but earnest!
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
4 – 19 May
Willy Loman spent his entire life as a travelling salesman chasing his fortune and never succeeding. Now, suffocated by debt, discarded by his boss and losing his grasp on reality, his hopes continue to rest on his son Biff, the golden boy who never lived up to the promise he showed in high school.
In an unforgiving present, Willy grasps at the straws of a past he idealises and refuses to let go of false dreams for his son, despite the fact that Biff, who once worshipped his father, has come to reject him.
Day One, A Hotel, Evening
15 – 30 June
FORTY-somethings Sam and Tom are not just business partners, but good friends, as are their wives, Madeleine and Stella. Their privileged lives of business deals, dinners out and squash games are the usual urbane rituals of the middle-class. But as boredom sneaks up them, each of the four embarks on a thrilling adventure, finding their destinies on a collision course with the beguiling young strangers, Ray and Rose.
The result is a web intricate and far-reaching, where erotic thrill-seeking becomes an intense flirtation with catastrophe. Love, seduction, envy, desire and revenge are the strands that wrap around their shiny lives… and it all starts very simply on day one, in the evening, in a hotel room.
Other Desert Cities
20 July – 4 August 2013
After a six-year absence, Brooke returns to her parents’ home in Palm Springs, California, with a bombshell. She is about to publish a memoir about a terrible event in her family’s past, a tragedy that her parents do not want to remember.
Brooke has come home to draw a line in the sand and is daring her family to cross it. Her brother won’t play her game; her aunt knows way too much and her parents fall into all their old routines as they plead with her to keep their story quiet. In this family, secrets are currency and everyone is rich.
Shrine
31 August – 15 September 2013
Shrine is set above the rocky headlands of the South Coast of Western Australia, between a forest and the sea. It’s wine country, and a privileged young man, Jack, has been killed driving friends back to Perth from his parents’ beach house. Jack leaves in his wake a wreck of a father, a shadow of a mother, and the promise of a love affair that never quite happened.
A year later, Jack’s father Adam meets the small town girl, June, who shared a strange and life changing night with Jack hours before he died. Domestic heartbreak transcends into mythology in a landscape inhabited by ghosts.
Midsummer [A Play with Songs]
9 November – 24 November 2013
Helena is a divorce lawyer who can’t keep her hands off other women’s husbands. Bob is a small time crook who is getting far too old to be on the wrong side of the law. They meet in a bar on a Friday night. They have nothing in common and should never sleep with each other. But they do.
Their one night stand turns into a crazy and wonderful weekend full of ruined weddings, bags of money, car chases, Japanese rope bondage, sex and stubborn hangovers.
The Studio Underground
THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT
17 January – 3 February 2013
Jackie, a petty drug dealer, is just out of prison and trying to stay clean. He’s also still passionately in love with his coke-addicted childhood sweetheart, Veronica.
Ralph D. is Jackie’s smooth-talking, shifty Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. He’s married to the jaded and sharp- tongued Victoria, who, by the way, has the hots for Jackie. And then there’s Jackie’s cousin Julio, a stand-up, “stand by me” kind of guy.
When Jackie finds a man’s hat in the flat he shares with Veronica, his jealousy spirals out of control and mayhem ensues.
Set amongst New York’s Puerto Rican community, The Motherf**ker with the Hat is a mix between a sit com, Hispanic telenovela and true crime documentary. It’s hysterical, irreverent and as foul-mouthed as it is funny.