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Shorts
Here are the award-winning or noted short-form plays whose productions range from a few minutes to lengthy one-acters. Each inclusion in this collection has been selected by the Australian Script Centre to be listed for viewing or purchase on its website Australianplays.org. These twelve plays are designed either for full production or as workshop exercises with allowances for a few or a goodly number of actors and theatre support staff. Some have been produced many times by groups either in advanced-level schools or at theatre festivals.
Spouting Black Holes
SPOUTING BLACK HOLES is a first-time collection of seven of Bill Reed's most popular plays. The works collected here are: Mr Siggie Morrison with his Comb and Paper Burke's Company Truganinni Bullsh (including More Bullsh) Cass Butcher Bunting Just Out of Your Ground You Want It, Don't You, Billy? Each play has been 'modernised', in that the playwright has changed the plots as necessary to bring them into a modern context and to bring colloquialisms to be more familiar to the modern ear. Here and there, staging, too, has been altered to reflect modern-theatre's economies of scale. Settings and characterizations, though, have been very little changed.
You Want It, Don't You, Billy?
Bill and Billy are having marital problems but these pall when compared to the problems they have to face from their next door neighbour. If that wasn’t enough, there is the general alarm put out to be on the alert for a serial murderer thought to be in the district. In the heavy night of the Mornington countryside, their weekender cottage offers scant protection from what is determined to befall them from the outside and what is determined to torment them from the inside. It is not as if they find themselves living in some scripted fiction where the fear comes driving at them intermittently but can be pulled back from with a flick of a light switch. No, this night they find themselves within the clutches of an evil that is constant, unharboured and unanchored. This night the pretend-fear becomes the real fear… the production gallops towards reality. It is difficult to tell who is who, or what is what. The only thing Bill and Billy – and anyone else – know is that all becomes very real dead mad.
Dogod
Ed: following is the Thomas-Nelson-Australia’s 1977 blurb for the original edition, but here annotated, in italics, by the author for this reprint. ‘Bill Reed’s first novel is a celebration of the Australian language. ‘Dogod’ employs a language that uses our sounds, our national images, our landscapes and our slang to examine our rhythms and forms of speech. Leading back through the images-as-words of Joyce, Carroll, Thackeray and Shakespeare…’ (I thought I was the one making with the jokes here?) ‘… here is a lament for the human condition as it is affected in modern times.’ (I lamented a bit over the manuscript too. All I know was it was a neat pile of typescript pages ...
Throw Her Back
Smith, and then his son Terry, found they were just as snagged on Hindu’s damning wheel as their forebears had been for over 170 years, until the family finally managed to carry on to Australia. The two of them thought they could ride belatedly to the rescue of Terry’s once little-she twin who was simply never handed over at the adoption ceremony those years before… especially since they discovered she had escaped being returned to sender at birth as some sort of yoni-assembled piece of mis(s)-manufacture. But they found themselves caught in the spokes of child rackets, caste delusions, and probes into the country’s female-gender issues that are only attached by wires to ultrasound machines. Nandi Baba, the Kapalika priest, with his best-brandy Tantra practices, gave them hope of saying enough’s-enough, until his conjured Hag goddess, a-quiver sexually, came down upon them. The book is set in Australia, India and Sri Lanka and is fictionally based on real events – and, most devastatingly, on even Indian Government statistics showing in many places mathematically-impossible discrepancies between official birth rates of boys over girls. ----------------
Wi
Surely you remember Wi, a name especially chosen to fit our attention spans? The world-record kidnappee, nabbee, swipee, snatchee, hoisted so many times even he’s lost count? (How about those three times in five minutes effort? That takes rare raw talent, that does.) I mean, if it wasn’t for our Wi how many of these yabbers, yarns, shaggy dogs and yank-your-chain whoppers could I trot out for you? Even getting across one’s not easy when it’s always against the wind from people laughing in your face. No, really, without our Wi, where would all the odd-balls be, drowning their sorrows by ingesting the food in Dominic’s Eatery, swallowing whole mouthfuls without a thought for their ow...
Living on Mars: the play
Henry had one good eye until the surgeon lost even that one’s lens down some drain. He had a wife he could call his own until she started to shack up very noisily with some young turk Australian postgraduate in his (Henry’s) own home. He had a housekeeper until she left in built-up disgust claiming Henry continuously confessed to some vague past unspeakable crime. Henry also had this itch which his new housekeeper – his wife’s cousin – could keep in check with her very personal fingernails. Then there was his house-full of irreplaceable objects until his new housekeeper’s husband came along and proceeded to methodically clean him out. Try as he might, though, Henry couldn’t get...
Daddy the 8th
An ensemble of actors who are about to start rehearsing a play about the Moree race riots visit Endeavour Lane in Moree to get a feel of the lie of the land. This is where the young Aboriginal 'Cheeky' McIntosh was shot and killed during the infamous 1982 rumble between local whites and blacks. The leader/director/writer of the ensemble has a more intimate knowledge of the site. Back in 1982 he remembers playing cricket with his school chums using, as a lark, a wicket made up of a piece of the makeshift ‘stockade’ Cheeky and his mates tried to hole up behind. Now, while the actors mill around Endeavour Lane, an old man appears in their midst, sits down and declares he is waiting for a bu...
The Wild Waves Whist
Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curtsied when you have and kiss’d, The wild waves whist. He was so good at Serious Matters but the trouble was people never took him seriously, let alone kept dying around him. Nor did it help that he was the wrong person in his body, such that the precocious girl-child who claimed to be the better fit kept nagging him while they bobbed along the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean. He shouldn’t have shouted ‘Left!’ when it should have been ‘Right!’ to send his Humvee into an Afghani roadside bomb. He shouldn’t have left his darling wife and bubba-to-be alone in their Queenslander while he dabbled in giving witness to the whole ...
