What does it mean to live in the space between departure and arrival? What does it mean to be part of a global diaspora— to understand ‘belonging’ as a practice, rather than a destination? Where is home, exactly? Tracing the lineages of disparate families resettled on these lands known as Australia, the plays in this collection seek to offer an answer. The long way home need not always be lonely.
In Tasnim Hossain’s The Village, boy meets girl, grandmother meets grandmother. Over flowerbeds, kitchen tables and shared melodies, medicine student Jay and street busker Taylah discover that a love story doesn’t always need to be romantic.
Looking for Alibrandi, adapted by Vidya Rajan from the novel by Melina Marchetta, returns to the Italian migrant community of twentieth-century Australia. Three generations of Alibrandi women are bound by a family curse. It’s all fallen on seventeen-year-old Josie Alibrandi—already cursed by strict school nuns, racist peers and looming Year 12 exams—to break it.
In Jordan Shea’s Malacañang Made Us, two Filipino families remain entwined by the forces of history. As another Marcos rises to power 36 years after his father’s brutal legacy of martial law, young activist Leo confronts family secrets long buried by his father and his uncle: two boys who had stormed Malacañang Palace on the eve Ferdinand Marcos’ regime fell. Winner of the 2024 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award.
‘[These playwrights] take the fragments of displacement and make from them a new kind of wholeness, one that honours where they come from while daring to dream beyond it.’— Suzy Wrong
