Description

Singing the Lonely Heart is loosely based on the life of American writer Carson McCullers. This Gothic fantasia reveals Alana Valentine's engagement with a compelling magic realist style. Set in Columbus, Georgia, in the late 1920s, the play opens at a travelling freak show, where Carson first becomes aware of her sense of difference. It goes on to depict an unconventional Southern upbringing and its inevitable clash with the narrow-minded attitudes of small town America—particularly its racial and sexual prejudices. Out of this conflict Carson emerges as a character who is at once disarmingly frank and worldly yet strangely innocent and affecting.

In Ozone, a man has been stripped of his skin just as the world is being stripped of its protective membrane of life-saving ozone. But flying back with him to Australia are four deal-makers who have in their power the ability to reverse both his and the globe's fate. Or do they? A surreal and hilarious comic farce meets a deadly environmental thriller in this compelling drama which fuses the pain of love with the horrors of global warming.

Biography

Alana Valentine

ALANA VALENTINE is an acclaimed dramatist and librettist working in theatre, musical theatre, opera and film. Described by Time Out as ‘an essential Australian dramatist, who writes the marginalised and oft-persecuted fringes of Australia into our dramatic canon with long-denied dignity and grace’, Alana has three plays on the NSW HSC Syllabus – Parramatta Girls (Drama), Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah (English) and Cyberbile (Design). Her play Letters to Lindy, drawn from the 20,000 letters in the National Library of Australia has had hundreds of amateur and school productions. Alana is particularly distinguished in her skills as a co-collaborator having worked in libretto and musical theatre such as Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (co-written with Christos Tsiolkas), Wudjang: Not the Past (co-written with Stephen Page) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (co-written with Ursula Yovich) The latter won the 2019 Helpmann Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score, as well as numerous Green Room Awards. Her most recent plays are Nucleus, Wayside Bride, The Sugar House and arc for erth physical and visual theatre. Alana has chronicled her practice as a close work/verbatim theatre maker in Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Life. Her website is www.alanavalentine.com