Inner West artists challenge anti-Asian racism in new project
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YOUR FREE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
A P R I L , 2 0 21
AMAZING GRACE
BY PATRICK MCKENZIE race Truman is impressive. At the age of 16, she has already performed with the Bell Shakespeare Company in Titus Andronicus, The National Theatre of Parramatta and Belvoir St Theatre in productions of Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam, and is in her final year of high school - studying a full HSC course load. I’m sitting down to chat with her in the living room of her family home in Birchgrove – the same one that features throughout the web series she’s cocreated with her Mum. “I’ve literally just come out of a chemistry assessment,” she tells me. The inspiration for the web series, Graceful: Amazing Grace series two, is immensely personal. In late 2014 her father, AWGIE Award-winning screenwriter and actor Jeff Truman, passed away suddenly. Inspired by the stories and memories that he left behind, Grace and her Mum, director and producer Julie Money, devised a series that they would create and write together to celebrate him, with Grace as the star and her Mum in the Director’s chair. “We decided that we needed to find a way that we could remember my Dad so that we could keep his memories alive. The web series format is so flexible and gave us so much freedom, we could put it out there for free and everyone could access it, and we could share my Dad’s stories with as many people as possible.”
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Inner West Actress deals with grief via new web series
A HEALING PROCESS
The series follows Grace, playing a slightly fictionalised version of herself, dealing with the throes of her teenage years in high school. At the beginning of every episode, she sings its theme: “Where are you now that I miss you,” in reference to her Dad, who appears in the show as a sort of imaginary friend that only she can see, serving advice – and plenty of comic relief – in times of struggle. “He’s only appears to me because it’s meant to be me thinking about what he would say. It’s me taking a breath and finding my own way to get through things,” Grace says.
He had a big personality and was always the entertainer This version of her Dad is played by Ben Wood (Top Of The Lake, Underbelly), who may be most familiar to viewers as the perennial father figure and recurring Australian everyman in a vast number of TV commercials over the last decade-and-a-half or so. Wood’s cheerful performance lends some necessary levity to the series’ steady undercurrent of loss and mourning. Grace says Ben was a natural fit for the role. “As soon as we met we had this instant connection... he looks kind of similar to my Dad in many ways. We say that he’s a taller, younger version of him, but he’s got that kind of nature about him that reminds us of my Dad.” Continued on page 4
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