Deep in an ancient wood. On the wrong side of the U.S. Mexican border. In these short plays, a full moon unites two dangerous frontiers, centuries and continents apart.
While a young woman wrestles her daughters’ whereabouts from a beguiling witch in “Kindling”, an old photographer pleads innocent to a pair of border cops in “Broken Promise Land”.
One ethereal, the other acerbic, both plays are new works by Tommy James Green, who is fast asserting himself as a dynamic writer-director who can deliver pathos across a range of genres, from the comic to the gothic.
In “Kindling”, a townswoman flees to the forest in search of her missing daughter. Who else but the loathsome witch within could have stolen her away? The battle of wills between the women imperils all the desperate mother ever thought she understood. Do devils really stalk the shadows in this godforsaken wood? Is the witch just another victim of the gossips? Did she ever have a daughter at all?
In “Broken Promise Land”, an aging, East Coast photographer is detained by a pair of border guards who pick him for a drug mule. For the old man, the nearby Aztec ruins, nuclear sites and Adobe forts are just fuel for inspiration. For the cops, they’re drop zones for the most dangerous cartel their department has ever faced. The interrogation pulls at the seams of civilisation and reveals a fractured America. Is the old man’s story just a fairy tale? Or is there something to the way the desert light moves that’s more than just mirage?
A dark night of the soul, for four nights only at the Emerging Artists Space (Erskineville Town Hall), in association with the Sydney Fringe.
