Bite Sized Back for a Second Helping!
That's right after the success of last year's Bite Sized season Gearstick is bringing it back for '09 with another four short plays in four short weeks. Bite Sized 2 - A Second Helping sees Gearstick return to the infamous Ambassador Room upstairs at Romano's Hotel to bring you a selection of the world's greatest playwrights to be devoured with drink in hand and you'll be out in time for dessert!
 Bite Sized 2 will kick off with Skin Deep by up until recently local playwright Alex Nicol. First performed in London it is a dark and disturbing comedy about the quest for utopia gone bad. Directed by Craig Higgs it will certainly kick off the Bite Sized 2 Season with a bang.
March 13 & 14
 Week two sees Charles Sturt University Design for Theatre and Television Lecturer Scott Howie join the Bite Sized directorial team with well-known Australian Playwright's violently poetic monologue Dog. In Dog, a man beyond the brink revisits the day an imaginary dog drove him to insanity
March 20 & 21
 Kevin Poynter takes over for Week three with the bittersweet two-person play by Murray Schisgal about coworkers Paul and Sylvia who type names out of the phone book for salesmen. Though the action of the play is continuous, The Typists moves forward from Paul's first day to many years later, capturing fights, despair, friendship, and the raw need to keep going through their lives.
(By Arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty. Ltd., On behalf of Dramatists Play Service, Inc New York)
March 27 & 28
 Closing the season we hit the darkly comical world of Pulitzer Prize winner (author of Quills and I Am My Own Wife) Doug Wright with Michelle Higgs taking the directorial reins of what Wright describes as a "macabre bedtime tale for adults". Baby Talk is the hilarious story of a woman who becomes unwound when her precocious baby begins to speak early while still inside her womb.
(By Arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty. Ltd., On behalf of Dramatists Play Service, Inc New York)
April 3 & 4
So once again Wagga audiences got to indulge in a taste of some of the world's great playwrights all in bite sized chunks and with drink in hand - what more could you ask for?
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I found the meat of the text had the tendency to be confusing, and the dynamic between the two characters didn't always work. Indeed I had no real sense why the committe member would be forced to do what Mr weird crazy man said (except maybe because it said so in the script)but definitly not because she was compelled to do so by any intent from Paul (Skins) Taylor's character. I do not know if this was a script flaw or a character/acting flaw or perhaps a bit of both. Aside from the lack of intent in his character I think Skins was strangely creepy as the Man and Hanna Cormick was funny and brilliant as the bubbly, passionate Member.
The direction of this piece appeared to be confidently relaxed, with great use made of the visual and comedy. I
thought the design worked well especially the ingenuity of the sunken bed (and thus half the reason the visual aspects worked so well).
Apart from the few moments of "oh my God those are a really old pair of TIGHT boxer shorts, must I witness this!" I was engaged and interested in this piece, if somewhat baffled by some of the content.