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TRIGGERED

• About Alex

  Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. In 2008 he made his writing debut with Once Upon a Midnight, a bilingual, bicultural horror rock musical in Okinawa, Japan, where it opened the Kijimuna Festival (now Ricca Ricca Festival) and played to rave reviews and full houses, before selling out again at the Adelaide OzAsia Festival. He has subsequently written and published works for a number of Australian theatre companies, and he is currently developing a new work in London. On screen, Alex has written and directed short films which have played to a variety of international festivals.

• Writer's Note

  Triggered

   

  Am I a good person?

  This is the question that underpins Triggered. I’ve written for several publications, critiquing the Trump movement, Reform in the UK, and conservative politics in general. One of my friends has called me a ‘left-wing shock jock’. While I wear my beliefs on my sleeve, and bore people at parties, I do think ideological mudslinging has become a sport. Especially on the left. Especially in the arts.

  The character Good Mike––yes, that name is intentionally obnoxious––is me on a caffeine day. He’s superficially neurotic, a little messy, but fixed in his beliefs and convinced his side is unimpeachable. His inner-pride borders on the sanctimonious.

  Rhino is subversive and unfiltered. His vulgar ‘comedy’ challenges Good Mike to look at the world from multiple sides, to acknowledge partisanship, and to factor in class and complexity. He’s not written to be a nice guy, but he knows he’s complicated. That gives him the edge over Good Mike.

  Class is a blind spot for the new left. There are real Rhinos in my life who’ve challenged me to admit that. Maybe seeing each other is the first step towards an empathetic life, if not a ‘good’ one.

  NB: This play was written in early 2024, over a year before Charlie Kirk’s murder. All characters and events in the show are entirely fictional.

SPARE A THOUGHT FOR JANA WENDT

• About Nicola

  Moving from Melbourne to regional SA four years ago, Nicola Watson is a treechanger, educator, songwriter and emerging playwright living in Penola on Pinechunga land. She writes about socio-economic inequality, status anxiety, and the sometimes slippery space between allyship and tokenism. Attending Melbourne University some decades ago, she almost failed the Bachelor of Creative Arts. Shortlisted for the 2023 Patrick White Playwright Award and SA Jill Blewett Literary Award, her debut play Spare A Thought for Jana Wendt will be performed at La Mama HQ in Carlton, Melbourne in April 2026.

• Writer's Note

  Spare A Thought For Jana Wendt

   

  Spare a Thought for Jana Wendt emerges from lost hours doomscrolling climate news, realestate.com.au and the myschools website. It’s a response to the ubiquitous claws of Airbnb versus the worsening drought of affordable housing. It’s an expression of my most materialistic and altruistic selves, and all the versions that exist in between.

  The main characters of this play are products of my inner critic, my wider circle, and my closest friends. They are fierce and flawed, funny and scathing, right and wrong.  Representatives of their time and context, they weave threads of real and imagined conversation from the vast Australian middle-class.

  We want to believe that we are good people. We want to be generous, kind and forgiving, and we are all capable of this (when fitting, convenient, and the context permits).  But perhaps we could be moreso. I don’t think I do enough to make things better.  Do you?

  At the very least, we might: spare a thought.

  Special thanks to the one and only Jana Wendt, who has lent her name in a demonstration of both her excellent humour and creative sensibilities.

CULTURE SLAP

• About Alexis

  Alexis West is a Birra Gubba, Wakka Wakka, South Sea Islander and Caucasian woman and a mother, writer, director, collaborator and performer in life, film, theatre, poetry, dance, weirdness and events.

  She has written, collaborated, performed and directed works with No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Karrikarinya Theatre Collective, Kurruru Youth Arts, State Theatre Company South Australia, Yirra Yaakin, Act Now Theatre Company, Jute Theatre, Illbijerri Theatre, Slingsby Theatre Company, Theatre Republic, Vital Statistix, Hit Productions, Tjaratjura Dance Theatre and A Daylight Connection.

  Alexis has presented and shared stories for NITV’s Around the Traps, written and directed short documentaries and received a laurel from Imaginative Film Festival for Jump & Bounce.

  Her work has been published in Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Mindshare, Ora Nui, Our Mob, ‘The Rock Remains’ First Nations SA Anthology and Spirit Festival Catalogues, and translated into Polish for Poetiks.

  During the pandemic Alexis was writer in residence at State Theatre Company South Australia and wrote 10 monologues for the Ruby Award-winning Decameron 2.0 project with Act Now Theatre.

  Alexis co-wrote Sista Girl with Elena Carapetis for State Theatre Company South Australia and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company. Alexis was recently hazed into A Daylight Connections Theatre Collective with Eulogy at Yellamundie Festival and most recently The Blok! Her work House Arrest was performed at Yirramboi 2025.

  Alexis is an SA Literary Fellowship Winner and Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Award winner.

LOST SOCKS AND POLKA DOTS

• About Sarah

  Sarah is a playwright, dramaturg and emerging filmmaker, specialising in verbatim theatre and community-engaged storytelling.

  Her plays bald heads & blue stars, twelve2twentyfive, Eternity and Blister are available via Australian Plays Transform. Sarah’s most recent play An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Hugs was produced by South Australian Playwrights Theatre (Adelaide) in 2024, and Conundrum Theatre (Singapore) in 2025.

  Through her work as a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Flinders University, she researches collaborative theatre-making processes within an ethic of care, solo performance, and dramaturgies of theatre. Her co-authored monograph, Verbatim Theatre Methodologies for Community-Engaged Practice, was published with Routledge in 2023.

• Writer's Note

  Lost Socks & Polka Dots

   

  Based on 16 interviews with people living and working in residential aged care and their families, Lost Socks & Polka Dots is a one-person verbatim play about ageing, care, and the memories we keep of the people we love. I’d like to acknowledge the excellent support of Professor Sue Gordon, Dr Alex Cothren, the residents and staff at Barossa Village, everyone who generously met with me to share their stories, and my family, for always graciously allowing me to weave our world into my writing.

  Synopsis

  Matilda is watching her parents become the “sandwich generation” – caring for their parents on one side and keeping up with their grandkids on the other. It’s heartbreakingly hard, and Matilda seeks out the stories that might help her understand. From HR managers and carers to retired telephonists and single adult children trying their best, Matilda asks; how can we do the right thing for those we love, without losing ourselves in the process?

  With heart, humour and ‘round the kitchen table’ style storytelling, Lost Socks & Polka Dots reminds us that it’s everyone’s first time at this, there are people who want to help, and you should always say yes to the biscuit.

THE SPOIL

• About Piri

  Piri is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker living and working on Kaurna Yerta. His one act tragedy Forgiveness won the 2020 Jill Blewett’s Playwright award and played at RUMPUS to a sell-out season in 2021. The Spoil was shortlisted for the Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award in 2024. Piri’s feature film debut as a writer, The Debt, is currently in production and will premiere at the 2026 Adelaide Film Festival.

• Writer's Note

  The Spoil

   

  The Spoil is about the breaking up of a family, but really it’s about the end of the world. What happens to our communities, the people we love, our way of being, when everything around us begins to flatline? In the face of such tremendous change, do we work obsessively to save what might already be lost, or cherish and hold what we still have? I don’t have the answers to those questions, and neither does The Spoil. But it does, at the very least, speculate what a future full of loss but rich with beauty might look like, and what we may still do with that world.

  As for the seeds, those magical life-creating specimens full of stories and place and culture? Those should be cherished and protected. And as an actor once said to me, F*** Monsanto!

LOG BOY

• About Anthony

  Anthony is an award-losing writer based in Adelaide. His credits include Black Widow Pussy (Theatre Republic) and Boys of Sondheim (Melt Festival, Sydney Mardi Gras). His play, Log Boy, was shortlisted for the Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award and longlisted for the Theatre503 International Playwrighting Award. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Age, Splinter Journal, Krass Journal, The Saturday Paper and The Suburban Review. His essays have been included in collections published by Black Ink and Wakefield Press. He is currently under commission with Brink Productions SA and Theatre Republic, and is developing a full-length non-fiction work for Pink Shorts Press.

• Writer's Note

  Log Boy

   

  I was engaged to a man named Jamie Anderson. He was 24 years older than me. Every Tuesday night, Jamie and his best friend Justin would have what they called ‘sister-dates’ and have long conversations over a glass of wine.

  One night, Jamie said ‘you know… I would’ve been a great leather daddy, darl. I’d look great in a pair of assless chaps’.

  I started to surreptitiously record their conversations. I felt I needed to document the way that these two men talked about all of the people and the time they’d lost. About AIDS. About their lives now and then. About what happens when generations collide.

  I started writing a play where three gay men, Anthony, Jamie and Justin, were haunted by the ghostly spectre of a murderous Leather Daddy. Then, in late 2022, Jamie unexpectedly passed away. And I realised the grief I was writing about in the abstract was suddenly my own.

  Log Boy is a play about grief and what it can do to you if you let it. And, I guess, a tribute to Jamie and men like him – All wonderful. All ridiculous, gone too soon and deserving of a place on the stage.

Creative Team

• 

  Director

  Yasmin Gurreeboo
• 

  Director

  Nescha Jelk
  
• 

  Director

  Maeve Mhairi MacGregor
• 

  Director

  Anthony Nicola
• 

  Director

  Alexis West

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