White Russian

by Joseph Goodrich







featuring:
Genevieve Mooy
Emma Palmer
Sean Barker

Directed by James Beach
Set & Costume Design by Colleen Reeks
Movement Johanna Puglisi
Lighting Design by Joshua Emanuel
Sound Design Isabella Kerdijk
Stage Manager Holly Woollard
Head Electrician Jennifer Slattery
Set Supervisor Sam Mezups
Costume Supervisor Anne Kwok
Properties Supervisor Georgina Buchanan

Deputy Stage Manager Caitlin Porter
Lighting Asst/Op Jack Audas Preston
Sound Operator Lauren Tulloh

Lighting Supervisor Verity Hampton
Sound Supervisor Robin McCarthy
SM Supervisor Juliette Kingcott

Presented by NIDA as part of 7 New Exposures 07 at the Parade Theatres, 28 November - 1 December 2007

We are ground to dust between the millstones of terror and anti-terror - Anna Politkovskaya, 2004

Life is dangerous! We risk immolation when we step out the door - Joseph Goodrich, 2004

Where are we now in 2007? In Russia we understand a nouveau-Stalinism is flourishing; in America the Presidency may well be shared between two families for as many as 28 years; here, we emerge from the neo-Menzies era.

Josephs Goodrich's enigmatic anachronisms ask us to recognise the relationship between one time and another: are these people post-war White Russian émigrés or post-9/11 New York socialites in aristocratic drag? Perhaps they are purer still, figures of light and shade - hostile to definition - stepping out of the frame of a Fellini film or falling from the pages of Gide.

Like them, are we not sentimental, nostalgic, envious, grieving? And like them, are we not stuck for words - for beliefs - when neither our conspicuously flawed society, nor certainly its declared fundamentalist enemies offer anything resembling true freedom? Do we change, or do we cling to what we know?

To be, or not to be?

- James Beach