Cirrus@Austlit

'"Precipice" is a play about two characters balanced right on the edge, hovering, held in the moment before inevitable change. It's about recent times — the tensions between anxiety, threat and compassion. About a society where some desperately want to raise the barricades, while others weep as they feel humanity slipping away.

It's about the bridges between us. About how powerful and how fragile they are. The Tasman, the Westgate, the one over your favourite creek bed in a childhood memory. How deeply these engineering marvels, these sites of suspension, imagination and tension are stamped in the Australian psyche. And it's about how potent, but often how seemingly insignificant and mundane, the chasms that divide us can be. And the awakening of the discovery that we may not just be simply divided after all.

Mel is a 40-year-old single working mother, struggling but strong, trying to maintain family, job and herself in a harsh world. A potent childhood incident has left her suffering from chronic vertigo, which she is only able to relieve by running. Al is older, a compulsive reader of death notices, and an obsessive attendee of the funerals of strangers. Through interior monologues and far-reaching conversations they reveal their pasts, presents, inner worlds and differing levels of consciousness as their lives converge. Source: http://castlemainefestival.com.au/ (Sighted 19/04/2011).