Endangered: Three Plays

Three plays that make a powerful statement on Australia's relationship with the environment in the shadow of global warming. With an introduction by Chris Mead.

They Saw a Thylacine by Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton

Out of the darkness, Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton conjure the ghost of one of Australia's lost beauties, the thylacine. With all the suspense of a campfire story, these feisty, funny women weave a lyrical tale of adversity and extinction. For this thylacine tracker and this zoo keeper's daughter, it's a quest not just to protect a threatened creature, but themselves. Rebellious and gutsy, these women face life and fight to survive.

Extinction by Hannie Rayson

Extinction delves deep into the heart of our own morals, choices and tightly held convictions. It wraps an important conservation message around a unique and personal human story. A wild, rainy night, a twist of fate and an injured tiger quoll bring together a passionate environmentalist and an unlikely Good Samaritan. Both are hell-bent on saving the species, but intentions are murky. What will be compromised in the quest to save the quoll? Nothing is black and white in this intriguing story about love, sex, money and power.

The Honey Bees by Caleb Lewis

As the world's honeybees disappear, a family-owned apiary struggles to keep up with overseas demand. Driven by matriarch Joan's iron will, the business continues to grow. And then Melissa arrives out of the blue. The Honey Bees is a tale of family and empire; action and consequences; and what happens when the bee finally stings.

JUSTINE CAMPBELL is a director, writer and actor and is co-artistic director and co-producer of HUMAN ANIMAL EXCHANGE. In 2016, their co-production with Malthouse Theatre of the award winning They Saw a Thylacine toured Australia. Campbell's work as a writer includes Back From The Dead Red (Melbourne Fringe), The Dust and Us (La Mama) and Untold which was co-written with Sarah Hamilton for MTC as part of Cybec Electric. Campbell has been a participant in MTC's Women Directors Program as well as Theatre Works' Directors Lab. A member of the Green Room Awards independent theatre panel, Campbell's awards include: Stand Out Performer Awards NZ Fringe 2014, Green Room Award Best Female Performer in an Independent Production 2010 and Equity ACT Green Room Award for Professional Performer 2007.

SARAH HAMILTON is a writer, performer and co-artistic director of Human Animal Exchange. Her first play A Donkey and a Parrot toured to Melbourne, Adelaide and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. With Justine Campbell she has co-written The Dust and Us (La Mama), Untold (MTC Cybec Electric) and They Saw a Thylacine. Thylacine won the Best Performance and Tiki Tour Ready awards at Melbourne Fringe in 2013, and was nominated for Best Theatre at Adelaide Fringe and three Greenroom Awards: Best Writing, Best Female Performers and Best Production. Following a collaboration with Malthouse Theatre in 2015, Thylacine toured nationally through Performing Lines in 2016, and was nominated for a Helpmann Award for Best Regional Touring Production. Hamilton has a Masters in Writing for Performance through the Victorian College of the Arts.

HANNIE RAYSON has established a reputation for topical, complex dramas written with wit and humour. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University and is a Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. They include Please Return to Sender, Mary, Leave It Till Monday, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Competitive Tenderness, Life After George, Inheritance and Two Brothers. She has been awarded two Australian Writers' Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier's Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier's Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award. She also wrote Scenes from a Separation with Andrew Bovell. For television she has written 'Sloth' (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange (ABC/Artists Services). A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia's Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine. Rayson made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.

CALEB LEWIS is a multi-award-winning playwright, theatremaker and experience designer. Plays include Nailed, Men, Love and the Monkeyboy, Dogfall, Death in Bowengabbie, Rust and Bone, Songs for the Deaf, Bluebottles, Crystal, Aleksander and the Robot Maid, The Honey Bees, In a Dark Dark Wood, Six Million Hits, The River at the End of the Road, Maggie Stone, and Clinchfield, which won the inaugural Richard Burton Award for New Plays. Games, installations and interactive entertainments include Exclusion Zone, Across a Crowded Room, Half an Hour Visit, and the multi-platform If There Was A Colour Darker Than Black I'd Wear It – winner of the 2013 Ruby Award for Innovation. A resident artist at Griffin Theatre, Australia's premier new writing theatre, Lewis was mentored by Nick Enright (Blackrock, Lorenzo's Oil) and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). He is the winner of an Inscription Award, the Philip Parsons Award (in absentia), and the inaugural AWGIE (Australian Writer's Guild Award) for Digital Narrative. Lewis' work has been commissioned and/or produced by Bell Shakespeare, Black Swan Theatre Company (WA), State Theatre Company of South Australia and numerous small to large companies across the country as well as overseas. Current projects include commissions for Hothouse (VIC) and Sport for Jove (NSW) as well as a triptych of interactive projects for the series, Uncertain Playgrounds. Reviews and further production details are available at http://caleb-lewis.com/.