03.03.15
The buzz is in the building! The previews are filled to overflowing! Suzie Miller’s play Caress/Ache opens at Griffin this week. You may remember Suzie as one of our Studio Artists, or if you spend a bit of time in Perth you may have seen her work onstage there but this is her Sydney mainstage debut. If she is reading this her nerves will be increasing exponentially. But I fully expect you all to embrace her play as enthusiastically as her directors and actors have.
I have spent the last few days trying to describe the extraordinary audience we have here at Griffin for our Australia Council funding application. The new guidelines have asked us to speak about our six year vision for the company. I have been trying to articulate what makes Griffin so special in the national theatre ecology. Apart from being the only theatre in the country dedicated to new Australian plays (pretty special)… I keep coming back to the Griffin audience. Your capacity to support, question, understand, debate and improve new plays with your responses is astounding. The fact that you are consistently willing to walk up the stairs at Griffin and hand over your night to a playwright and a group of actors is astounding. You are not asking for comfortable theatre experiences, you don’t know the ending (Lear always dies. Often it is sad). You are curious. You are brave. You are sophisticated. You are rigorous and exacting. And you are generous. And our playwrights need all that. You make them better writers.
It would sound really daggy if I called you the best audience in the country on the application. But that is how we think of you inside the Griffin office. Thank you in advance for taking care of Suzie Miller and her new play.
See you in the foyer,
Once I have finished the application,
Love Lee
