Black Swan State Theatre Company announce 2018 Season

Black Swan State Theatre Company announce 2018 Season

Last Updated: 30 Aug 2017
Jen Bowden
Perth’s Black Swan State Theatre Company has announced it’s 2018 Season and you really won't want to miss it!
This year’s programme focuses on a mini festival of ‘conversations’ with each production paired up with another. The idea is that the production showing in the Heath Ledger Theatre will complement one in the Studio Underground, and vice versa.

Artistic director Clare Watson announced the programme at a bustling launch event at the Heath Ledger Theatre this week in front of a packed audience of sponsors, subscribers and press.

Clare said, ‘Curating the 2018 season we began by asking the question: “What should we be talking about right now, as citizens of the world, as Western Australians, as humans?” We wanted the theatre that you see at Black Swan to catalyse and contribute to these big conversations.”

‘Our season in 2018 is designed to encourage compassion and extend empathy and most importantly, to entertain. We are thrilled to continue to build our community of artists and celebrate exciting collaborations.’

Conversation One: The Boys Are Back in Town
Ray Lawler’s 1950s drama Summer of the Seventeenth Doll sits alongside gender-bending American kitchen sink drama Hir by Taylor Mac. Both plays begin with men returning home, only to find things have irrevocably changed.
Conversation Two: Hit Me With Your Best Shot
The multiple Tony Award-winning Assassins by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman is paired with The Events by Scottish playwright David Greig. Assassins is heralded as ‘a timely reminder that those in power ignore the marginalised in society at their peril, while extremism and gun violence come under the microscope in The Events.
Conversation 3: Together in Electric Dreams
You Know We Belong Together, a co-production with DADAA, kicks off the 2018 season at Perth festival, with only four performances in early March. Directed by Black Swan Artistic Director Clare Watson, this extraordinary play looks at the beauty and complexity of living with Downs Syndrome. It’s paired with Skylab, a truly unique sci-fi comedy set in Esperance written by Melodie Reynolds-Diarra and co-produced with Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company.
Conversation 4: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
This conversation is made up of a pair of productions that explore the representation of women across a century. In The Next Room, Or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl is a hysterical parlour drama set in the 1880s. Xenides, devised by Clare Watson, is a top-dollar musical exposé about Adriana Xenides, the under-appreciated 1980s game show host from Australia’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’ that comes complete with original music by electronic pop group The Twoks.

Be sure to get in line and make sure you grab tickets for all of these truly exciting shows.

Photo credit Cameron Etchells

Black Swan Theatre Company Performing Arts

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