The Store Room Presents 2009

The Store Room presents Attract/Repel by The Melbourne Town Players, a performance-interrogation into self and the other, by Ming-Zhu Hii.

Attract/Repel is a raw, beautiful and idiosyncratic investigation into racial identification, discrimination, and the darkness and light inherent in Australia's many-cultured society. It takes an unflinching look beneath the surface at who we are, how we behave, and why we are still being racist.

In collaboration with four of the country’s most exciting actor/theatre makers, Ming-Zhu Hii goes beyond the pale, averts the politically-correct, and asks the questions we’ve all been too scared of for far too long.

Attract/Repel is a remarkably rich and unmissable new work from The Melbourne Town Players, creators of the critically acclaimed Sandwiches.

This is theatre at its most courageous.

Lucy Freeman’s directorial projects include: Kill the Wolf (9minds 2007), Wild East (Red Stitch 2007), Cunversations (Theatreworks 2005), Brilliant Silence (La Mama 2005), The Perfume Garden (The Beckett, Malthouse, 2004), Teething Problems (Chapel off Chapel 2003), MOJO (INstorage, 2003), and Lonely Lenny Lower (La Mama 2002).

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a little death production of

STRANGERS IN BETWEEN (Melbourne Premiere)
by Tommy Murphy

From playwright Tommy Murphy (Holding the Man) and director Ben Packer (Mercury Fur), comes a surprising and tender play about accepting the kindness of strangers.

little death productions is excited to present the Melbourne premiere of one of the best new Australian plays of recent years, Strangers in Between.  This work by the rising star Sydney playwright Tommy Murphy forms part of the Store Room Theatre’s 2009 season.

Shane runs away from home and finds himself alone in Kings Cross, confused by a new world of sex and doing his own laundry.

Strangers in Between‘s original production in 2005 in Sydney launched playwright Tommy Murphy’s stellar rise. The Sydney Morning Herald called the play “bitter and sweet and replete with raw emotion … entertaining and forceful”.  SX News went a step further and claimed it to be “the best new Australian play since Michael Gow’s Away”.  Strangers in Between won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Best Play in 2006 and Murphy went on to adapt Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man for the stage.

little death productions is an independent theatre company that seeks to present work that is vital and visceral. The company presented Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley in 2007 at Theatreworks before touring the production to Sydney as part of Griffin Stablemates.  Critic for The Australian and theatre blogger Alison Croggon proclaimed the production as “quite simply, brilliant theatre”.

Director Ben Packer
Producer Laura Milke Garner
Set/Costume Micka Agosta
Lighting/Sound Ben Watts
Original Lighting Concept Govin Ruben

With Aljin Abella, Bruce Kerr & Cameron Moore

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