AUDITIONS: The Man From Mukinupin

We invite you to audition for the first play of the season, The Man from Mukinyupin by Dorothy Hewett, directed by Aarne Neeme.

Dorothy Hewett, one of Australia’s most renowned literary figures and former staff member at UWA wrote several plays specifically for the New Fortune Theatre.

Renowned director, Aarne Neeme who was involved with Hewett in the development of some of these works, returns to Perth to direct this production that will feature during the university’s Alumni Weekend celebrations.

AUDITIONS: Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 December 2012
SEASON: Friday 8 - Saturday 23 February 2013 at the New Fortune Theatre, UWA
REHEARSALS: commence 12 January 2013

You will be expected to present a prepared piece roughly three minutes long of your own choosing and may be asked to read from the script. You should also bring a prepared song and sheet music or your own backing music.

THE PLAY: Set in the fictional small town of Mukinupin, the play tells the story of Polly Perkins and her love for Jack Tuesday, the grocer's boy - a match seen as ‘most unsuitable' by her parents. The course of true love never does run smooth and Jack has a rival in Cecil Brunner, a much older travelling salesman who is infatuated with Polly and believes he would make her a much better husband! The whole proceedings are watched over by Clemmy and Clarrie Hummer, two elderly spinster sisters who are ‘not backward in coming forward' in their views about the town and its gossip.

The play was commissioned by Perth's National Theatre at the Playhouse as a festival occasional piece to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Western Australia.

On the surface, this play suggests a light-hearted musical romp through only happy memories of ‘the good old days'. There are simple boy-meets-girl stories and happy-ever-after endings, all of which are never really united with the harsh rural landscape. This underlying contradiction is a formidable theme throughout the play as the mirroring and contrast between day and night, white and black, innocence and sin, celebration and shame, honesty and deceit are embodied in the several sets of identical twins in the characters.

THE PLAYWRIGHT: Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) is credited with being a playwright who has produced some of the greatest lyrical epics of Australian life for the stage. The Man from Mukinupin is a quintessential illustration of the Hewett's ability to ‘tell it as she sees it' as it is drawn from her own experiences growing in rural Western Australia with all of its gritty human achievements as well as the darker side of white regional history.

Born in 1923 in Perth, Hewett was a well educated young woman who became a factory worker and Communist Party activist in Sydney (from 1949-59) before turning to writing plays and becoming a writer-in-residence with universities, theatre companies and student groups. She became a playwright after being a successful poet, and much of that lyrical quality she acquired as a poet can be seen in musical language of her plays. Like Brecht, who was also a consummate poet who let his eye linger upon contradiction and the complex motives of social justice, there is an ‘epic' aesthetic to all her stories for the theatre. Hewett uses aspects of Brecht's alienation techniques (or verfremdungseffekts) too by administering shocks to the audience, mainly because she also wanted to stir up the ‘bourgeois complacency' she saw in theatre. Hewett's plays can be placed into two groups: "those that are intensely personal and autobiographical that deal with sexual and family relationships (up to the late 1970s) and those from the mid-70s that ‘assert the need for imaginative cherishing of the Australian cultural landscape". The Man from Mukinupin is undoubtedly a hybrid of both these phases in Hewett's writing.

THE DIRECTOR: Aarne Neeme
Director and Educator Aarne Neeme has directed over 200 professional theatre productions since 1962 and has worked for most of the major theatre companies in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and has been engaged for television work. He has been Artistic Director for The Actors Centre (Sydney), at The Hole in the Wall (Perth), Hunter Valley Theatre Company (Newcastle), and National Theatre Company (Perth), and has directed plays for most of the major Australian theatre companies. Neeme has also had Resident Director posts at Nimrod Street Theatre in Sydney and The Octagon Theatre in Perth. He has taught at both academic and vocational tertiary institutes in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, and was Head of Drama at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts for many years. His television directing credits include Neighbours, All Saints, Home and Away, MDA, Out of the Blue and Blue Heelers. His work and studies have taken him overseas to The National University of Singapore (as a Senior Fellow) and to Europe (as a Churchill Fellow). Neeme has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New South Wales.

Please contact bookings@grads.org.au to arrange an audition time

Bookings email address: bookings@grads.org.au
Bookings name: Yvette
Payment: Unpaid
Website: http://www.grads.org.au

GRADS is a Perth-based, not for profit community theatre group that specializes in plays chosen from the classic repertoire, ancient, traditional and modern, inviting regular theatre-goers and students to see the best plays ever written, performed live and at affordable prices, in a professional theatre venue.

Address: P.O Box 3023, Broadway Nedlands, WA 6009