Just like New Yorker Dunham, the creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls, Barron has been holding her own when it comes to collecting accolades. Last year, her play You Got Older won her an Obie Award, which recognises work Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, and placed the work smack bang in the centre of Red Stitch’s radar. “It was the hottest play off Broadway,” says Cousins of how it came to their attention. It was also the finalist for the 2015 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a Drama Desk for multiple awards including Best Play.
For close to 15 years now, Melbourne’s Red Stitch has been presenting the best contemporary writing from around the world, racking up hundreds of productions in that time. Cousins, a founding member of the Red Stitch ensemble, says they enjoy good relationships with agents in the US, UK and Europe and they watch closely other companies who “have put out good work in the past and have good writers in their stable” and then sift through the scripts deciding what to present here. “Some of the ensemble members are charged with going through scripts and pushing it to the broader ensemble what works, you know what they think could be in the ballpark, they’re careful to put out a broad range, and then we fight basically. We fight,” he says with a laugh.
“They’re great fights because they’re all about artistic direction and what works in plays and literary merit and what our audiences will like and what turns us on as actors and all that sort of stuff,” he elaborates. While Barron’s play was subject to the same process, Cousins, who is an actor and writer as well as being a director, says choosing You Got Older was “a bit of a no brainer” given the quality of the writing.
You Got Older, billed as a black comedy, tells the story of Mae, who must return to her family home when her father falls ill after being dumped, unemployed and – adding to the misery – covered in a rash.
“We meet her at her lowest ebb. What happens when you’re a strong, independent lawyer and everything has gone to shit?” says Cousins, who directs Emily Goddard as the protagonist. The rest of the cast for this Australian premiere includes Lee Beckhurst, Francis Greenslade, Penny Harpham, Eva Seymour and Mark Yeates.
“It’s all about when the life that you had planned for yourself goes completely belly up. When do you consider yourself an adult? When do you go from being a child, girl or boy, to a man or woman? And those rites of passage moments in life that really define that. So it’s not so much a mid-life crisis as what happens when [but] what happens when the path you’re on drops you off a cliff?”
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
