20.11.11
Who are Hazel and Ruby?
Hazel and Ruby are the two main characters in Smashed. They are teenage girls and best friends. Like all best friends, they have a complicated relationship, but theirs is especially complicated due to time and space.
Where did you meet them?
I met them when the director Clare Watson first suggested their names to me- when we were throwing around ideas for what the characters should be like. It was her idea that it should be about two best friends. But I guess like all characters that you create they were girls that I sort of knew from my own adolecense – some parts me, some parts my friends and some parts made up. They are both really into fantasy, and they’re part fantasy, part real life. It was so long ago I wrote it now, it’s hard for me to remember creating them, but I remember the aspects in them that remind me of other people and of myself from when I was that age.
What were you wearing?
Well at the time that I wrote the play I was waitressing all the time in the Hard Rock Cafe, so most likely I was wearing one of those black dresses, an apron and white sneakers that were the Hardrock Cafe uniform in early 2005.
Smashed exists somewhere between little-girl dreams and the realities of early adulthood, what are you memories of that stage of your life?
My memories from that stage of my life are of being intensely close with my friends and living myself half in fantasy and half in reality. At that time especially, reality didn’t feel fixed to me. Coming of age seemed surreal and I was always wondering how possible it was to create your own reality- to sort of live in outer space. I remember feeling like the surfaces of things could be easily bent or melted. I didn’t trust that what I was seeing was real, and I was often looking for an escape. Not in a bad way, just out of deep interest.
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