The Glass Menagerie Program

CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE PRESENTS BELVOIR’S

3-7 MAY 2016

Luke Mullins

CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE PRESENTS BELVOIR’S

Director EAMON FLACK Belvoir’s production of The Glass Menagerie opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Wednesday 24 September 2014.

Set Designer MICHAEL HANKIN

Stage Managers ISABELLA KERDIJK, LUKE McGETTIGAN Assistant Stage Manager KATIE HANKIN Production Secondment FRASER ORFORD

Costume Designer MEL PAGE

With

Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER

Jim O’Connor HARRY GREENWOOD

Composer & Sound Designer STEFAN GREGORY

Tom Wingfield LUKE MULLINS

Deputy Sound Designer JEREMY SILVER

Amanda Wingfield PAMELA RABE

Video Design Consultant SEAN BACON

Laura Wingfield ROSE RILEY

Dialect Coach PAIGE WALKER-CARLTON Assistant Director JADA ALBERTS

The Glass Menagerie is presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

PRODUCTION THANKS Kylie Clarke Wigs, Judy Bunn (Melbourne Theatre Company), Scott Fisher (Sydney Theatre Company), Georgia Hopkins PHOTOGRAPHY Brett Boardman | DESIGN Alphabet Studio

Director’s Note Eamon Flack

In 1943 the man obsessively writing and rewriting numerous versions of this play (half-drafts, short plays, short stories, a film) was a restless 32 year old with a few minor theatrical successes and a wobbly stint as a screenwriter at MGM behind him. He was somewhere between the half-formed kid he’d been (Tom Williams of St Louis, Missouri, son of Edwina and Cornelius, brother of Rose and Dakin) and the man he thought he wanted to be (the poet and dramatist Tennessee Williams). In other words he was very much Tom Wingfield, the narrator of his unfinished play, raging eloquently in the shadow of his youth yet still seeking the clear light of his fate.

Like Tom Wingfield, Tom Williams was a poet and a homosexual, and like Tom Wingfield he had slipped the knot of a particularly interesting family situation in St Louis, leaving his troubled sister in the sole care of his troubled mother.

But who would do for Tom Williams what Tom Williams was trying to do for Tom Wingfield? How to make something of the vividness, the madness, the lust and the pain which had characterised his adult life? Where was Tennessee Williams when you needed him? Sure, Tom Williams had called himself Tennessee for four years already, but the fact remains that in 1943 Tennessee Williams was really just an outsized moniker for a restless 32 year old obsessively writing and rewriting versions of this play…

Meanwhile, his elder sister Rose Williams was recovering from a lobotomy at the State Hospital in Farmington, Missouri.

Except of course one doesn’t really recover from a lobotomy. Her fate, unlike her brother’s, had already been decided: the vividness, the madness, the lust and the pain which had characterised her adult life was to be kept in trim for the rest of her existence by institutional medical care. Unlike her brother, there seems no output from her long life. Except for this: the fate of Rose Williams is the organising principle of the play that came to be called The Glass Menagerie by the playwright now very much known as Tennessee Williams. Laura’s quietness in the play is loud with the absence of Rose’s voltage. In the legendary stakes young Tom Williams had set for himself when he left his sister to his mother and grandly took the name Tennessee, the poetic force of Rose’s lobotomy is dreadfully perfect: once there were two Williams siblings, so close and so alike, both so full of impulse and oddity, both so original and forceful, but now only one of them could still speak for himself.

When 1943 rang its terrible bell for Tom/ Tom/Tennessee, his play acquired a new purpose: not only must he rescue himself from the clumsy oblivion of ordinary life, he must also rescue his sister.

The play he managed to write wants everything for itself: truth and illusion, penury and theatrical grandeur, delicacy and brutality, eternal life and utter momentary fragility. The multiplicity of details and ideas and forms is immense.

Williams looked back into the shoebox of his years in St Louis with his sister and mother (he lobotomised his real-life father and brother from the stage) and created a

tiny theatre in the theatre, a small private stage for the large drama they performed for each other. Out of the small mire of their daily lives there emerged from time to time glimpses of an enormous vision at work. It was a compound of many visions.

There was a vision of munificence – a largeness of temperament, a beneficence, a sense of latter-day glory on earth – a very American vision, wonderful until it swells to the psychotic proportions of American megalomania, which it very often does.

There was a vision of capitalism, at once effervescent and obtuse, characterised by roughness and sameness and massness (mass-ness was such a theme last century; now, when the world is twice and three times as large, we seem to have forgotten it). There was a vision of human optimism, a weave of delusion and good faith. There was the lost glory of his mother’s 19th century Southern childhood, dropping its plum-line deep into the ageold schadenfreude of knowing for sure that one has lived through a golden age which no longer exists. There was a vision of non-compliance, a knowing refusal to accede to the claims of reality, neither domestic reality nor the reality of war and history. There was a Whitmanesque vision of poetry in the midst of squalor. There was a vision of love, both impossible and inescapable, ruined and pure, secret and undeniable. There was an unarticulated vision for something else, something different – perhaps not so much a vision as a queerness in the lens that altered all the other visions and had its own peculiar primacy.… Such a wonderful, Eamon Flack

deranged concoction of visions for such a small family.

Williams put them all in the play and bound them in the tyrannical details of daily life – a dozen genies in one tight bottle. But still he wanted more for his play (for his sister?) so he added a projection screen, titles, a narrator, a love story…

He made a great contemporary tragedy in a little room. He wrote it like a dream, like a film, like a memory, like a wound, and he gave it a perfect dramatic arc. All this – the detail, the originality, the experimentation, the rawness – unfolds with dizzying exactitude on the page, forceful and gorgeous and a little bit euphoric. But the sad silence at its centre is perhaps the most eloquent thing about it.

Tom Wingfield’s fate in the play is unknown because Tom Williams’ own fate wasn’t sealed until the play opened.

When it did, in Chicago in 1944, the play became its own denouement: its greatness was recognised almost instantly, and both Toms entered the spheres of their own destiny. Tom Wingfield became trapped forever inside the infernal machine of the

play, bound by his intimate, intractable acquaintance with vision and peculiarity.

And Tom Williams finally filled out his oversized new name. The full-blown life of Tennessee Williams was now in motion – but that’s a whole other story…

As for Rose Williams, she never lived outside of a medical facility again.

Tennessee paid for her care. When he died she inherited his estate. She outlived her brother by 13 years. In some secret way his greatest plays were all about Rose. This particular production is an attempt to do for this play what Tennessee Williams tried to do for his sister: to revive a peculiarity in the midst of crushing sameness; to come to know and hopefully never forget what it is to have a care for a queer, fragile, beautiful thing; to look past the obvious for the truth. Tennessee Williams is foolhardy, by which I mean heroic, to propose such an undertaking. The rough vitality of our society doesn’t care. It obliterates indiscriminately. What do we do about the gentle, the odd, the peculiar, the monstrous, the marvellous, the broken?

But what are we without them?

Autobiography and Faithfulness Luke Mullins

Many writers, and for that matter all kinds of artists, plunder their own lives for material. An appalling night out or a desperately embarrassing situation involving a famous celebrity and vomiting in a handbag is gleefully met with the refrain of: ‘Well, it’s all good copy’. It may be true that everyone has a story to tell, but what separates another exercise in narcissistic self-mythologising from a work of art?

of O’Neill’s own family, written in 1941 (before The Glass Menagerie) but not performed until 1956, two years after O’Neill’s death and well over a decade after The Glass Menagerie had, in the words of Arthur Miller, ‘in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history. In him (Williams) American Theatre found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and amplitude of feeling.’ 1

When working from real life the advice often given is to tell the truth (really the truth), however painful, embarrassing, exposing and accidently hilarious.

Alternatively, the artful disguising of the truth can create valuable friction between reality and invention. At the very beginning of The Glass Menagerie, Tom the ‘narrator of the play and also a character in it’ (and avatar for the playwright Tennessee Williams) tells the audience about a trick that is sometimes played on them. Tom/Tennessee says: ‘I am the opposite of a stage magician.

He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth, I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’

If O’Neill had had his way Long Day’s Journey into Night would not even have been published until 20 years after his death and, according to his wishes, never performed. His great autobiographical work about a patriarchal family (father, mother, two sons) was written at the end of his career, and he felt so ashamed (guilty? mean? untruthful?) about the portrayal (betrayal?) of his family he could not let it be seen in his lifetime.

The Glass Menagerie is one of the two great American autobiographical plays, the other being Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. O’Neill transformed American theatre in the early 20th century and writers such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller emerged in his wake to write some of the great plays in the English language.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is the story

Williams’ great autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, written at the very beginning of his career, was his first big success and the work that made him. He writes about a different type of family – one headed by a woman of incredible strength and delusion, relying on the income of her son who is forced to deny every desire he has in life in order to deal with their common problem: a daughter and sister who has no tenable future. In order to escape this trap, Tom must act without pity.

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill uses the real names of his family members, but changes his own to

Edmund. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams changes everyone else’s but keeps his own. Having played Edmund for Sydney Theatre Company in 2010, I am fascinated by the prospect of now playing Tom and the differences between these two acts of autobiography. There is an adage that to get away with brutal autobiography it is necessary to be hardest on yourself. In his play O’Neill gives himself the name of a brother who died as an infant. Williams uses his real name – Tom – not the ‘Tennessee’ he adopts as a persona for the rest of his writing life. When are they hiding and when are they telling the truth?

Tom (and perhaps Tennessee) has trouble telling the truth in The Glass Menagerie.

His mother gives him several opportunities to explain where he goes at night and what he does (i.e. who he is) and he can’t. He uses the excuse, the lie, of an escape to the ‘movies’. Tom and Tennessee’s desperate need for love, companionship and sex is unnameable, both to the people it is pulling him away from and on the American stage at the time the play was written. So it is hidden, coded and deniable. As an artist examining the intersection of truth and fiction in 2014 it is undeniable. To tell the truth about this, to not allow the deniability of what Tom and Tennessee are, is very, very important.

The inhabitants of The Glass Menagerie attempt to find a way to live in the world outside their apartment, a world of rigid binaries. One attempt is the introduction of the ‘most realistic character in the play’ – a gentleman caller named Jim. Like some

kind of refugee from the world of Arthur Miller, Jim is drawn briefly into this other world but his ultimate rejection of it is a catalyst that finally shatters the delusion that any one of this family might belong to his world. By rejecting what some might view (erroneously) as a ‘happy ending’, Williams successfully delights in and insists upon the destabilisation of the binaries that Arthur Miller polices so avidly.2 A gentleman caller is not and was never going to be the answer to any of their problems. It is necessary to imagine a new answer, outside the paradigm the gentleman caller is drawn from, a new way of living. Tragically, Tom is the only one able to do this, and in order to make it a reality and not just an imagining, he must act ruthlessly. The guilt he experiences for this act pursues him all his creative life; the women he abandons become both his furies and his muses, reconfigured again and again throughout his oeuvre.

The Glass Menagerie is a classic queer text, as are all of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and this is essential to contemporary productions of his plays, especially when set in their original time and location as our production is. To not deliver this to our audience would be a betrayal; an act which autobiographical writers are often accused of. ‘ Here is make-believe so real it tears your heart out.’3 Does telling the truth, even when presented in the pleasant disguise of illusion, necessi­ tate a betrayal? In autobiography, although you may be exposed, even humiliated, is

it perhaps worse to escape unscathed, to be left out of the story, to be deemed not relevant to the forging of the myth?

Was Tennessee Williams faithful to his family in telling their and his story? How can we be faithful to all of them in telling it again this year? Should we be? Is simply setting it in its original time and place being faithful to the play and the playwright?

Or is faithfulness about a commitment to something bigger than that, something to do with truth. Something that is really happening for the writer, for us on stage, and most importantly for the audience.

When Tom talks about the stage magician at the beginning of the play – the person who gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth – he is talking about a lie; something that looks and sounds like reality but is not actually happening. It is not the truth. Let’s not be magicians; such tricks are a temporary escape and will only sustain you for the time it takes to see them disappear. Like Tennessee let us seek real magic, like the magic of falling in love that is being pushed so hard upon his sister but utterly denied to him.

1

Arthur Miller, 3 March 1984, quoted in Hayman, R., Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else is an Audience, Yale University Press, 1994.

2

D. Savran, Communists. Cowboys and Queers, The Politics of Masculinity on the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

3

Burton Rascoe, review of The Glass Menagerie in The Pittsburgh Press, 8 April 1945

Luke Mullins

Harry Greenwood

Rose Riley

Pamela Rabe, Luke Mullins

Biographies Tennessee Williams WRITER Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, the second child of a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman and an archetypal southern belle. He started writing as a teenager and studied journalism and arts at various universities. At the same time he wrote poetry, essays, stories and plays, especially when he was hauled out of school by his father to work at a shoe factory. When his first play, Battle of Angels, was panned at its 1940 Boston premiere, Tennessee Williams was devastated, feeling that the audience was unwilling to take on the play’s sexual and religious themes.

Boston City Council members called for the play to be censored and it ran for less than two weeks. Then, during the winter of 1944–45, his ‘memory play’ The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago where it garnered good reviews. When it transferred to New York, it became an instant and enormous hit during its long Broadway run – winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the season. It was the beginning of a decade-and-a-half in which Williams would establish himself as one of America’s truly great writers. He followed The Glass Menagerie with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Orpheus Descending (1957, a rewrite of Battle of Angels) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), among others.

Williams continued to be a prolific author of plays, screenplays, short stories and two novels until his death in 1983, aged 71.

Eamon Flack DIRECTOR Eamon is Belvoir’s Artistic Director. He was born in Singapore and grew up in Singapore, Darwin, Brisbane and Cootamundra. He trained as an actor at WAAPA from 2001 to 2003 and has since worked as a director, actor, writer and dramaturg all over the country, from Milikapiti on the Tiwi Islands to Melbourne and Perth. For Belvoir, Eamon has directed Ivanov, Angels in America Parts One and Two, The Glass Menagerie, The Blind Giant is Dancing, The Great Fire, Babyteeth, As You Like It, Mother Courage and Her Children, Once in Royal David’s City and The End. He co-adapted Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir Don’t Take Your Love to Town with Leah Purcell, and co-devised Beautiful One Day with artists from ILBIJERRI, version 1.0 and Palm Island. His dramaturgy credits for Belvoir include Neighbourhood Watch, The Wild Duck, Brothers Wreck and The Book of Everything. His adaptations include Chekhov’s Ivanov, Gorky’s Summerfolk and Sophocles’ Antigone. Ivanov won four 2015 Sydney Theatre Awards, including Best Mainstage Production and Best Direction.

Eamon’s productions of The Glass Menagerie and Angels in America both won Best Play at the Helpmann Awards. Coming up in 2016 Eamon will be directing Twelfth Night at Belvoir.

Sean Bacon VIDEO DESIGN CONSULTANT Sean studied video and visual arts, graduating with Honours in 1998. He has previously worked with Belvoir on The Glass Menagerie, Beautiful One Day (Belvoir/ILBIJERRI Theatre Company/version 1.0), Buried City (Belvoir/ Urban Theatre Projects/Sydney Festival) and Measure for Measure, for which he won (with Ralph Myers) a Sydney Theatre Award for Stage Design. He worked with the French dance company Experience Harmaat (2000–2), and their collaboration Nobody Nevermind opened the performance section of the prestigious Venice Biennial in 2001.

Other works include a solo show Collective (Cast Gallery, Hobart), a group show Brilliant Refraction (Cube 37, Melbourne) and a collaborative performance installation Sleeplessness (Performance Space 2003).

In 2005, he was awarded a three-month residency at the Australia Council’s Green Street Studios in New York. Sean has been a Company Artist for version 1.0 since 2005.

His work with version 1.0 encompasses The Table of Knowledge, the Helpmann Award-winning This Kind of Ruckus, the Drover Award-winning deeply offensive and utterly untrue, and the Green Room Awardwinning The Bougainville Photoplay Project.

In 2010, Sean worked as the video artist on the Sydney Theatre Award-nominated seven kilometres north-east, which toured to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2011, he also worked as the video designer for the English National Opera/Young Vic’s

production Return of Ulysses in London. In 2012, Sean worked on Pygmalion (Sydney Theatre Company). In 2013, he produced the video design for The Maids (Sydney Theatre Company, as well as its New York tour in 2014); The Major Minor Party (version 1.0); and The Vehicle Failed to Stop (version 1.0 at Carriageworks). In 2015, he worked as the video designer on Reflections of Gallipoli (Australian Chamber Orchestra).

Damien Cooper LIGHTING DESIGNER Damien has worked internationally across theatre, opera and dance. His designs for Belvoir include The Great Fire, Elektra/ Orestes, Blue Wizard, Radiance, The Glass Menagerie, Coranderrk, Miss Julie, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, Private Lives, Conversation Piece, Strange Interlude, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Neighbourhood Watch, The Seagull, Gethsemane, Keating!, Toy Symphony, Peribanez, Stuff Happens, The Chairs, The Spook, In Our Name, The Underpants, The Ham Funeral and Exit the King (including the Broadway production with Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon).

Other theatre credits include Suddenly Last Summer, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Effect, Children of the Sun, The Long Way Home, Storm Boy, The Splinter, Under Milk Wood, Pygmalion, Bloodland, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness, Zebra!, Blood Wedding, The Women of Troy, The Great, Riflemind, The Art of War, Ying Tong, The Lost Echo, Fat Pig, A Hard God, The Cherry

Orchard, Summer Rain, Metamorphosis, Boy Gets Girl, Julius Caesar, Far Away, Bed, Thyestes, Morph, The Shape of Things, King Lear (Sydney Theatre Company); Macbeth (Bell Shakespeare); Doctor Zhivago (GFO); and Shane Warne the Musical (Token Productions). For opera, Damien’s designs include Der Ring des Nibelungen, Aida, Cosi, Alcina, The Magic Flute, Death in Venice (Opera Australia); Peter Grimes (Opera Australia/Canadian Opera Company/Houston Grand Opera); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chicago Lyric Opera/Houston Grand Opera/ Canadian Opera Company); and Chorus!

(Houston Grand Opera). His designs for dance include The Narrative of Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Firebird, The Silver Rose (Australian Ballet); The Director’s Cut, Grand, Some Rooms, Shades of Gray, Ellipse, Air and Other Invisible Forces, Body of Work, Mythologia (Sydney Dance Company); Tivoli (Australian Ballet/ Sydney Dance Company); Of Earth and Sky, Mathinna (Bangarra Dance Theatre); and Multiverse, Be Your Self, Birdbrain (Australian Dance Theatre). For lighting design, Damien has won three Sydney Theatre Awards and three Green Room Awards.

Harry Greenwood JIM O’CONNOR Harry graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2012. For Belvoir, he has performed in The Glass Menagerie and Once in Royal David’s City. Other theatre credits include Love

and Information (Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company) and Fury (Sydney Theatre Company). While at NIDA, Harry performed in Caligula, Punk Rock, Flutter Kick, Rookery Nook, Idiot, Richard III, The American Clock and Too Young for Ghosts.

Harry’s film credits include Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Kokoda and 8. His short film credits include Pacific, The Water Diary, The Gift, The Unlikely Maestro and Steve the Chameleon. For TV, he has appeared in Old School and Gallipoli.

Stefan Gregory COMPOSER & SOUND DESIGNER Stefan’s composition and sound designs for Belvoir include Mother Courage and Her Children, Elektra/Orestes, A Christmas Carol, The Glass Menagerie, The Government Inspector, Hamlet, Forget Me Not, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, The Wild Duck, Private Lives, Medea, Death of a Salesman, Old Man, Thyestes, Strange Interlude, B Street, As You Like It, The Seagull, Measure for Measure and That Face. His other work includes Engel In Amerika (Theatre Basel); Medea (Toneelgroep Amsterdam); Rocco und Seine Brüder (Münchner Kammerspiel); Baal (Malthouse Theatre/Sydney Theatre Company); The Cherry Orchard (Melbourne Theatre Company); King Lear, The Present, Suddenly Last Summer, Face to Face, Money Shots, Dance Better At Parties, The War of the Roses (Sydney Theatre Company); King Lear, Hamlet, Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Puncture, Symphony (Sydney Festival/

Legs on the Wall); L’Chaim! (Sydney Dance Company); and There Is Definitely a Prince Involved (Australian Ballet). Stefan was a band member of Faker until 2008 and was awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2014.

Katie Hankin ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER Katie graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2012 with a Bachelor of Dramatic Art (Production). As stage manager, Katie’s credits include Midsummer Madness (Bell Shakespeare) and Rough Draft: Wake in Fright (Sydney Theatre Company). As assistant stage manager, her credits include The Glass Menagerie, Persona (Belvoir); King Lear, Endgame, Mojo (Sydney Theatre Company); and Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Phèdre (Bell Shakespeare). Katie was also dresser on Cyrano de Bergerac (Sydney Theatre Company) and the national tour of The Secret River (Sydney Theatre Company/ Sydney Festival).

Michael Hankin SET DESIGNER Michael is a NIDA trained set and costume designer for theatre and film. His credits include The Great Fire, Jasper Jones, Ivanov, A Christmas Carol, The Glass Menagerie, Angels in America, The Dark Room (Belvoir); Jumpy (Melbourne Theatre

Company/Sydney Theatre Company); The Aspirations of Daise Morrow (Brink Productions, Adelaide); Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Theatre Royal); Of Mice and Men (Sport for Jove); 247 Days (Chunky Move/Malthouse Theatre/Netherlands tour); As You Like It (Bell Shakespeare); Ugly Mugs (Malthouse Theatre/ Griffin Theatre); Truckstop (Q Theatre/Seymour Centre); Songs for the Fallen (Sydney Festival at the Spiegeltent, New York Music Theatre Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, Brisbane Festival and TRS); Rust and Bone, The Ugly One (Griffin Theatre); Obscura (Force Majeure/ Carriageworks); Fool for Love (Company B/Savage Productions); Miracle City (Hayes Theatre); The Boat People (TRS/ The Hayloft project); Judith (TRS); The Lighthouse, In The Penal Colony, Through the Gates (Sydney Chamber Opera); Liberty Equality Fraternity, Great Falls (The Ensemble Theatre); Deathtrap, Miss Julie, The Paris Letter, Macbeth (Darlinghurst Theatre); and Suddenly Last Summer, Women of Troy (The Cell Block Theatre). His short films include Reason to Smile, Julian and The Amber Amulet (both winners of the Crystal Bear, Berlin International Film Festival). Michael has received Sydney Theatre Awards for Best Independent Stage Design for Of Mice and Men in 2015 and Truckstop in 2012. He has also been nominated for Best Mainstage Design for A Christmas Carol, Angels in America, The Dark Room, Best Independent Stage Design for Deathtrap, Best Independent Cost­ume Design for Of Mice and Men, as well as two Australian Production

Design Guild Awards. Michael is one of the Mike Walsh Fellows for 2016 and is currently Associate Lecturer of Design at NIDA.

Isabella Kerdijk STAGE MANAGER Isabella graduated from the production course at NIDA in 2008. She has worked as stage manager and assistant stage manager on many shows including Jasper Jones, Mother Courage and Her Children, Kill The Messenger, The Glass Menagerie, 20 Questions, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person (national tour), Thyestes (European tour) (Belvoir); Replay, No More Shall We Part, This Years’ Ashes, Ugly Mugs (Griffin Theatre Company); Rainman, The Ruby Sunrise (Ensemble Theatre); Empire (Spiegelworld); Cranked Up (Circus Oz); The Mousetrap (Australia/NZ tour – LWAA); and Bubble (Legs on the Wall). As production coordinator, Isabella’s credits include Carmen (Opera Australia on Sydney Harbour). She has worked as production manager/stage manager for Puppetry of the Penis (A-List Entertainment). Isabella has also worked on various festivals including The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Sydney Festival and the Woodford Folk Festival.

Luke Mullins TOM WINGFIELD Luke has previously appeared for Belvoir in Small and Tired, Angels in America Parts One and Two, The Glass Menagerie,

Death of a Salesman and The Power of Yes, and in Thom Pain (based on nothing) for B Sharp/Arts Radar. His other theatre credits include Waiting for Godot, Little Mercy, The War of the Roses, Gallipoli, The Season at Sarsaparilla, The Serpents Teeth, Tales from the Vienna Woods (Sydney Theatre Company); Long Day’s Journey into Night (Sydney Theatre Company/Artists Repertory, Portland); The Duel (Sydney Theatre Company/Thin Ice); The Eisteddfod, 4xBeckett, Agoraphobe, Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, Untitled Intentional Exercise, Nine Days Falling, The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy (Stuck Pigs Squealing); Cloud Nine, The History Boys, Oedipus (Melbourne Theatre Company); Night on Bald Mountain, Autobiography of Red (Malthouse Theatre); I Heart John McEnroe, The Man with the September Face (Uninvited Guests); and Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (Fragment 31). Luke has also appeared on TV and in film projects such as Holding the Man (directed by Neil Armfield), and the UK televisions series New Blood soon to air. In 2013, Luke directed Kit Brookman’s night maybe for Stuck Pigs Squealing in Melbourne. Luke received a Green Room Award for The Season at Sarsaparilla and the George Fairfax Memorial Award for Excellence in Theatre Practice. Luke received a Sydney Theatre Award and the 2014 Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Supporting Role in a Play for Waiting for Godot. Most recently, Luke performed the one-person play Lake Disappointment (which he co-wrote with Lachlan Philpott) at Carriageworks, and he will follow

The Glass Menagerie with Back at the Dojo at Belvoir. Luke is a Graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts.

Mel Page COSTUME DESIGNER Mel is a costume and set designer for theatre and film, and is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. For Belvoir, Mel has designed costumes for Jasper Jones, Ivanov, Seventeen, The Dog/The Cat, Elektra/Orestes, Kill the Messenger, A Christmas Carol, The Glass Menagerie, Nora, The Government Inspector, Once in Royal David’s City, Hamlet, Angels in America, Strange Interlude, As You Like It and The Promise, and has designed set and costumes for Small and Tired, Medea and Old Man. Her other costume credits include Angels in America (Theater Basel); The Suicide, The Only Child, Spring Awakening (B Sharp/ The Hayloft Project); Macbeth, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pygmalion (Sydney Theatre Company); The Government Inspector, Pompeii L.A. (Malthouse Theatre); Depth of Field (Chunky Move); Complexity of Belonging (Chunky Move/Melbourne Theatre Company/Melbourne Festival); Baal (Malthouse Theatre/Sydney Theatre Company); Vs. Macbeth (Sydney Theatre Company/The Border Project); and The Nest (The Hayloft Project). She has also designed both set and costumes for Puncture (Legs on the Wall); Venus in Fur (Darlinghurst Theatre); night maybe (Theatre Works); and The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy (Stuck Pigs Squealing/Melbourne Theatre Company).

Caitlin Porter AUDIO VISUAL OPERATOR Caitlin is Belvoir’s Senior Technician. Her recent sound operating/programming credits for Belvoir include Death of a Salesman (including Theatre Royal and Geelong tours), Private Lives, Strange Interlude, Neighbourhood Watch, The Wild Duck (including Oslo, Vienna and Perth tours), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Miss Julie and The Government Inspector. A graduate of NIDA’s production course, Caitlin’s other sound design credits include Fool for Love (B Sharp/Savage Productions); Romeo and Juliet (Bell Shakespeare); Hamlet (Sport for Jove); The Ugly One, The Brothers Size, Orestes 2.0 (Griffin Theatre Company); Titus Andronicus, Three Sisters, Julius Caesar (Cry Havoc); That Face, Orphans (Red Stitch); KIJE (Old Fitzroy); As Bees in Honey Drown (Darlinghurst Theatre); and Growing Up (National Youth Theatre Company).

Pamela Rabe AMANDA WINGFIELD Pamela made her long anticipated return to the Belvoir stage in 2014 with The Glass Menagerie, and had previously performed in The Little Cherry Orchard, A Room of One’s Own, Gertrude Stein and a Companion and Cho Cho San. Her other acting credits include over 40 productions for Melbourne Theatre Company, most recently The Cherry Orchard, Hamlet, His

Girl Friday, Boston Marriage and God of Carnage. For Sydney Theatre Company, she has appeared in over 20 productions, most recently Les Liaison Dangereuses; and as a founding member of Sydney Theatre Company’s Actors Company, her credits include The War of the Roses, The Season at Sarsaparilla, The Lost Echo and Mother Courage and Her Children. Pamela’s directing credits include Jumpy, Solomon & Marion, Elling (Melbourne Theatre Company); In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, Elling, Serpent’s Teeth: Citizens (Sydney Theatre Company); and Porn.

Cake (Malthouse Theatre). She is currently appearing on television as Joan Ferguson in Wentworth. Pamela has won eight Melbourne Green Room Awards; a 2012 Helpmann Award for Best Female Actor in a Musical for Grey Gardens; a Mo Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Wizard of Oz; a Sydney Critics’ Circle Award for A Room of One’s Own; an AFI Best Actress Award for the feature film The Well and most recently an AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama for Wentworth.

CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE Director Bruce Carmichael

ADMINISTRATION Phone 02 6243 5711 Fax 02 6243 5721 admin@canberratheatrecentre.com.au canberratheatrecentre.com.au CANBERRA TICKETING Phone 02 6275 2700 Fax 02 6230 1098 canberraticketing.com.au

Rose Riley LAURA WINGFIELD Rose graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) in 2013.

She has performed in The Glass Menagerie for Belvoir and Flood for Black Swan State Theatre Company.

While at WAPPA, Rose’s roles included Ophelia in Hamlet and Mammy O’Dougal in The Cripple of Inishmaan. She also toured to Dublin with the Smock Gallery Theatre/ WAAPA production of The Swell Party.

Rose’s feature film roles include Truth and the upcoming The Death and Life of Otto Bloom. Last year, she starred in the television mini-series The Secret City. Her short films include Problem Play, Meat, Profile and All That Matters.

CULTURAL FACILITIES CORPORATION

Chair Mr John Hindmarsh Board Members Mr. Raoul Craemer, Ms Louise Douglas, Ms Harriet Elvin (CEO), Ms Virginia Haussegger AM, Ms Robyn Hendry, Mr Eugene Kalenjuk and Justice Richard Refshauge.

Chief Executive Officer Ms Harriet Elvin Chief Finance Officer Mr Ian Tidy

Canberra Theatre Centre is a part of the Cultural Facilities Corporation