Sharp Darts

7 ON

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781760627461
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Seven playwrights. Fifteen plays. Short plays, but whole worlds contained in them. Huge windows into the minds and times of seven extraordinary writers for the theatre.These award-winning playwrights—Donna Abela, Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Noëlle Janaczewska, Verity Laughton, Ned Manning and Catherine Zimdahl—collectively known as 7-ON, have collaborated over multiple projects since they banded together in 2005. Gathered here for the first time, Sharp Darts is a selection of some of 7-ON's best short works, chamber pieces for the stage and for audio. They take us from a lonely caravan on the edge of the ocean, to the footy oval of our teenage tragedies, a soulless suburban shopping mall, a futuristic island with its own language, a boat on a river in the deep deep dark, across a nostalgic backyard fence, inside the implosion of a dynasty, and beyond. These sharp, pointed portraits of Australia by some of our country's best playwrights are by turns dark, funny, surprising, moving and political, but above all inspiring in their vision and creativity.

AURORA’S LAMENT

Donna Abela

Characters:

AURORA, migrant from the Philippines

LUKE, young working-class man

JOAN, Luke’s mother

TRUCKIE, truck driver

Set in a suburban house and street, an office block roof top, a windy south coast caravan park, a highway.

Aurora’s scenes are in the present. To emphasise her sense of isolation and exile, I suggest that only present tense sounds from the caravan park accompany her speeches. Luke and Joan’s scenes are all in the past.

Aurora’s Lament was written for audio. It could, however, also be staged.

This work is a free adaptation of the Old English poem The Wife’s Lament.

PROLOGUE

FX Interior. Caravan in a gale force wind.

AURORA: after weeks of oblique glancing

fitful sleep

daydreaming maybes

we

between floors

stairwell sex

two office block cash-in-hand cleaners

buckets spilt

rubber gloves off

reaching

touching

going up in the world

FX Exterior. Office block roof top. Street sounds from below.

LUKE: who knew we had keys to the roof?

with you

heights up here don’t scare me!

I’m steady

and I can see all the Sydney bridges

lit up all around us

with you

I can feel my heart plunge and play

without you

I’d know none of this!

FX Interior. Caravan in a gale force wind.

AURORA: you took me home

took me in

opened up your musty bedroom

and asked about my past

asked enough to know to

leave it be

just sleep-fall with me into a tired tangle

a shared breath

letting your bed

safe as houses

float us away

FX Exterior. Backyard. Magpies and lorikeets chirp.

LUKE: she lives in the city

with some nuns

near their convent

in a special house for just ladies

is Catholic like us

but she can’t stay there forever

she cooks real good

is heaps kind

saves all her pay almost

but she isn’t stingy

she brings late night cakes to work

evening tea she calls it

and never lets me pay

she’s from the Philippines

her name’s Aurora

you’ll really like her mum

FX Interior. A kettle comes to the boil and screams.

JOAN: Aurora

Luke’s gone

he left

didn’t say why

well before dawn

didn’t you hear him getting up?

getting dressed?

forgetting his phone?

dead to the world were you?

well I heard him

did something happen between you two?

It’s just that

when Luke stopped doing drugs

he stopped sneaking off

but he’s good now

he’s got you now

got no reason in the world

has he

to shoot through like this?

FX Interior. Caravan in a gale force wind.

AURORA: now

in a caravan park

in a grove of grief

on a coast I don’t know

I want your olive skin

your chiselled lips under my fingertips

not this punctured heart heaving

Why was I exiled?

What did I do?

FX Interior. Caravan in a gale force wind. The windows rattl...