This is Jaimes Walch and Brad Plum in the Corowa Hall. The stage is set, the lights are up, the chairs are out. What will happen now?
Brad told me they’ve been taking lots of calls for bookings and since I’ve been with Jaimes his phone has been constantly ringing.
This is not like bringing a Shakespearian play to a regional theatre company. This is an unprecedented experience for me. People I don’t know, locals keep coming into the hall to set up chairs or clean the dressing rooms for the actors. There’s a poster of Marooned in Woollworths, other people are supplying tea and coffee for the audience – free of charge. In fact the town is plastered with posters of the play. People are organizing extra printing of images I have taken previously. They intend to stick them to the hall’s walls. They say, and I quote, the play is about people, humanity; we need faces on the walls. Two guys have been on stage, sitting on the waiting room seats and rhythmically banging the chairs. Excited they keep repeating, “Oh 379 is going to love these”.
The best explanation I can supply is that it’s not the expectation of a play coming to this hall but an experience. I told Gregory Caine who plays 1620, there’s a pressure on you guys to replicate what you’ve been doing every night, to justify all this grass roots support.
Because of Jaimes’ belief in this play, something very special is happening here, and despite the darkness of suicide, everywhere I look people are smiling, and their smiling faces are like light. And that is what I feel everyone feels or hopes is coming . . . The possibility, if only for two nights of a bright cathartic, light.
Corowa Memorial Town Hall
Oct 11 12 2019
FREE ENTRY
tickets call Call Jaimes Walch 0438297881
Michael Gray Griffith
