Productions

Wanderings

Diane Cilento Studio - Queensland Theatre as part of DOOR 3

Season dates: 30 November - 14 December 2024

Co-Writers: Margi Brown Ash, Zac Callaghan and Leah Mercer

Performers: Margi Brown Ash and Zac Callaghan

Director/Dramaturg: Leah Mercer

Set/Costume Designer: Rozina Suliman

Lighting/Projection Designer: Freddy Komp

Music/Sound Designers: Zac Callaghan and Olivia Cosham – The Joy Dispensary

Stage Manager: Sarah Connolly

“We will be lost and found a thousand times along this cobbled road of us.” - Atticus

Stella keeps losing things: Her books, her car, her daughter. She writes Post-It notes to help her remember but everything keeps wandering away. Her son, Kidd, is helping her transition from the family home into an aged care facility. As he packs up her life, together, they unpack a lifetime of stories.

Wanderings explores the challenges, demands and heart-opening opportunities of changing family dynamics and shifting identities through the eyes of a transgender adult child; an absent, estranged sister/daughter, Eireann; and their mother who is living with dementia.

When Stella's memories and her present-day dementia-affected behaviour meet Kidd’s newfound sense of self, we witness an unravelling and reweaving of this mother and son relationship. The family home is ghosted with memories from Kidd’s childhood experiences of gender dysphoria, alongside Stella’s fading memories of family life. Walking the line between humour and pathos, kindness and ferocity, movement and stillness, Wanderings champions kinship, acceptance and transformation.

Seeded in autobiographical experience, this World Premiere created by the multi-award winning team from The Nest Ensemble - Margi Brown Ash, Zac Callaghan and Leah Mercer - Wanderings embraces the universality of transitioning and the importance of connection.

Wanderings is a 2023 APT/Pride Foundation Commission.

This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; Australian Plays Transform; Pride Foundation Australia: GreenHouse National Artists Residency (HotHouse Theatre); Queensland Theatre DOOR 3; Jelley Family Foundation; and Curtin University.

Available to Tour

Queer as Flux

Written/Performed by Zac Callaghan Directed by Leah Mercer

Transitioning isn’t new – everybody’s always doing it: Drag Queens, babies, aging parents, Superheroes…even clownfish!

Autobiography meets activism in this homage to queer ancestors who paved the way, not-so-queer folks who did their best and the finned and four-legged who depend on us. Queer as Flux invites audiences to experience the world through the eyes of a grown-up tomboy, their Drag Queen Fairy Godmother and two wise old whales.

This intimate, uplifting solo performance by multi-award-winning artists Zac Callaghan and Leah Mercer celebrates transitions of bodies, hearts and minds via stories of gender, sexuality, spirituality, near-death experiences, dementia, dying and interspecies love.

Previous Productions

Previous Productions

  • EVE

    Written by Margi Brown Ash

    Directed by Leah Mercer

    Margi Brown Ash crawls beneath the skin of Australia’s Virginia Woolf: the enigmatic Eve Langley. Eve is the story of a writer caught somewhere between the domestic and the artistic; a story of a reluctant mother and passionate artist; a story for anyone who’s ever felt as if they never belonged.

    Part memoir, part fiction, part homage to the sacrifice of the artist, Eve is revealed as a woman at odds with her prescribed position as wife and mother to three children, and longs to be left alone to interpret the world through her viciously beautiful prose.

  • Joey: the Mechanical Boy

    Written by Margi Brown Ash & Leah Mercer

    Directed by Leah Mercer

    Joey is 9½ years old. Joey likes machines so much he wants to be one. But sometimes Joey explodes…

    Enter Dr Bruno Bettelheim: world-renowned child psychologist, Freudian, best-selling author, Holocaust survivor and Director of the School for Emotionally Disturbed Children and Adolescents at the University of Chicago. Dr B diagnoses Joey with autism and begins immediate treatment.

    But does the diagnosis say more about the doctor than the patient? And what about Joey’s mother? What does she have to say about all this? Based on an article published in Scientific American in 1959, Joey: the Mechanical Boy explores how personalities are made, destroyed and made again, and how sometimes imagination can be the best medicine.

  • HOME

    Written by Margi Brown Ash & Travis Ash

    Directed by Leah Mercer

    “In Margi Brown Ash’s HOME you are not an audience member, you are a guest – or even a family member – visiting a warm and welcoming place where Margi shares with you stories of her life and family. She blends these ‘ordinary’ joys and tragedies with ‘extraordinary’ stories of family and love – from Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris to perhaps even your own story. This experience will leave you relishing and re-imagining what makes each of our stories remarkable.” (Queensland Theatre)

  • The Knowing of Mary Poppins

    Written by Marcel Dorney, Leah Mercer, Margi Brown Ash, Zac Callaghan & Carol Schmidt

    Directed by Leah Mercer

    The Knowing of Mary Poppins explores the many lives of P. L. Travers, the Queensland-born writer of Mary Poppins.

    A compelling tale of a most unconventional woman, The Knowing of Mary Poppins follows the transformation of experience and memory into story.

    Though punctuated by the biographical details of Travers’ life, this work transcends a literal retelling of her biography by inviting the audience into the surreal world of her imagination where enchantment, magic and fairy tale characters come out to play.