Cirrus@Austlit

'Running with Emus is a new tragi-comic play about the conflicts and dynamics that arise as a community considers becoming a “Refugee Friendly Town”.

'Running with Emus is a new play by award-winning regional playwright Merrilee Moss about refugees, identity and belonging. Seventy-six year old Pat has dropped out of life. She is living on her veranda, watching birds, when her granddaughter arrives to stir up the town. Throw into the mix an Italian ghost from the past, a bigoted Mayor and a chorus of laconic locals and you have a story about what it is to be Australian in a multicultural world.' (Production summary)

'In a liminal, late night world, the playwright Oriel types her plays, stalked by her characters, battling her demons and sharing thoughts and reflections with modern day playwright, Moss. In a series of flashbacks, Oriel depicts the left wing bohemian world of Sydney in the early 1950’s, including vibrant moments from Oriel Gray’s unconventional love life, her passionate involvement with the New Theatre and her occasionally fractious association with the Australian Communist Party.

'In 1955, Gray’s play The Torrents shared the prize for best Australian play with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Both plays were promised production, but only The Doll was supported. Imaginative and dynamic, Oriel raises questions about the foundation of Australian theatre today.' (Production details)

'Australian Women Playwrights: the Sacrifice of Oriel Gray argues that multi-award winning left-wing Australian playwright Oriel Gray was sacrificed in 1955 by and for the dominant discourse in one symbolic act of “violence”. It investigates contributing elements and circumstances that may have worked together and separately to create and maintain Gray’s liminal status in the theatre world, despite her significant achievements, for more than half a century, and asks how it has been possible for Gray and her considerable body of work to be “forgotten” again and again. It also seeks to examine the manner in which Gray as an outsider/stranger/artist depicted sacrifice and expressed liminality in her work, and argues that Gray’s position provided her a particular point of view. The artwork at the centre of the thesis is the play script Oriel, structured by a dialogue between two Australian playwrights: ‘Oriel’ from the mid-twentieth century, and modern-day playwright, ‘Moss’. As a secondary task, both artwork and dissertation speculate on what effect the forgetting of Gray and her work may have had on the situation for women playwrights today, focusing particularly on contemporary multi-award winning left-wing Melbourne playwright, Patricia Cornelius. With reference to psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology, using a feminist lens and a synthesized practice-as-research methodology, this thesis highlights Gray as an innovative, important playwright, and argues that she was sacrificed precisely because of her significance.' (Publication summary)