Helicopters (excerpt)

Synopsis:

It is the day of the opening of the annual school play at Brissenden Secondary College.

The play’s lead, Babette, has been called up to the principal’s office, together with her mother, for swearing at a teacher.

Meanwhile, the male lead, Emo, together with his father, is seeing the school counsellor, in an effort to deduce the cause of falling grades.

Another ordinary day, it seems, until Cynthia Churchill – the music teacher – is shot dead by a rooftop sniper whilst visiting the latrine.

The SAS descends upon the school, which suddenly finds itself in lockdown.

In an extraordinary, sweeping, machine-gun narrative, building to an utterly eviscerating crescendo, Helicopters takes a merciless blowtorch to the entire edifice of modern parenting.

Using pseudo-puppetry, music and Shakespeare via real-time Facebook entry, the piece weaves an intricate, dense, multi-layered long day’s journey into a nightmare of our own making.

Character Breakdown:

The play is a nine-hander:  5 women, 4 men.

VLAD   EMO’S father, 40s
GAVIN   School Principal, 40s
BURGESS  SAS Team Leader, 40s
TESS  BABETTE’S mother, 40s
LORRAINE   AMY’S Mother, 40s
DANA   Counsellor, 30s
EMO   VLAD’S Son
BABETTE   TESS’S Daughter
AMY  GAVIN’S Secretary, 23

Sound of Schubert’s ‘Death And The Maiden’, Adagio Movement, played by chamber orchestra, as if in another room throughout the play.  This is being rehearsed, which means it can stop, restart or repeat itself at any time.

Throughout the play, Facebook/text/tweet entries are back-projected onto the set, being typed in ‘real time’ in text language.  These may be accompanied by photos, at the director’s discretion.  (Such entries appear in the text below in boldface.)

Running-time: 130 minutes.

Production History: Public reading at Parnassus’ Den 2012

Excerpt available for download for free.