Initiated by local Illawarra artists Michelle Fry and Zachary Hanlon in 2023, Ashworks continues in its second year to provide opportunities to budding artists in writing and creating some of their very first theatre work.

Selected based on an initial pitching process, the four shows in Ashworks: Close to Home promise an intimate, personal experience, something that will hit – well, close to home.

Producer: Zachary Hanlon
Lighting Design / Operator: Zachary Hanlon
Sound Design: Finn Allenby, Cris Chavez, Tori-Lee Joy Featon, Zachary Hanlon, Thomas Roberts & Emily Smith
Set: Steen, Finn Allenby, Cris Chavez, Tori-Lee Joy Featon, Zachary Hanlon, Thomas Roberts & Emily Smith
Publicity: Nick Kilpatrick & Zachary Hanlon
Posters: Finn Allenby, Cris Chavez, Tori-Lee Joy Featon, Ethan Millie Thomas Roberts & Emily Smith

About the Show: Sext me, I’m Bored highlights the struggles young women have with their sexual and mental health while also battling with ‘simple’ problems. Lost between her delusions and real life, this young woman contemplates her place in the world and how the choices she makes will affect the quality of her future. Culminating in a journey of self-discovery, she finds herself reclaiming her status as a woman, finding power in pornography and sexualisation.

This work hopes to shed light on the experiences that women are shamed out of talking about and apologise for how unbelievably difficult it can be to be a woman.

Writer / Director: Tori-Lee Joy Featon

Featuring: Charlotte Dickinson

About the Show: Maturing alters our perspective on life. Throughout the piece, Pinky Promise, the characters grasp concepts that are familiar experiences, parental conflict, gender, sexuality, abuse in alternative forms and much more. As we follow their journey, we connect to their progression of finding their true selves, in both feminine and masculine perspectives.

Utilising the ideology of Confessional by Oliver Beer (an art piece within MONA, Tasmania). “...Visitors can both listen and project sounds between the two points encouraging candid exchanges; and when no-one is present at the mouth, the experience of a Cageian wash of atmospheric sounds...” (MONA, 2019). When the protagonists are ready, they will open up, do you promise to keep their secrets till it’s time to speak up?

Writer / Director: Emily Smith

Featuring: Tanna Harris, April Rodgers, Elise Holland & Ben Rayner

About the Show: Sometime before October, a spectre is haunting Europe! To be more local about it, Russia…well a room in Russia. Samoylo Yegorovich Streborin is a former student that finds himself gripped with a deep melancholy, which weighs him to his bed each day. Desperate to inspire a change within himself, he reaches out with a simple message, if he cannot shake his melancholy by the end of the week then he will commit something great and terrible.

Over the course of a week Samoylo Yegorovich is visited by four figures all of whom challenge him in separate ways. Standing upon the shoulders of the literary giant that is Dostoevsky, this short work was an experiment to earnestly emulate his prose and expand on thematic elements of Existentialist works.

Writer: Thomas Roberts
Co-Directors: Zachary Hanlon & Thomas Roberts

Featuring: Thomas Roberts & Grace Wallace-Mitchell

About the Show: Have you ever thought about becoming obsolete? As a person, a friend, a colleague, a sibling? 04 shows the stories of four people coming to terms with their nature as the rest of the world, it seems, moves on without them. The humble payphone carries their struggles and calls you. Probably best just to let it go to voicemail, besides, who even uses a payphone anymore?

Writer: Finn Allenby
Co-Directors: Cris Chavez & Finn Allenby

Featuring: Sophie Brunner, Kate Walker, Michael Conrecode & Lexi Walker