Sixty Six Minutes
Produced by Fishy Productions

Cast: Andrew Crowley, David Foley, Rebecca Rocheford Davies, Naomi Fryer, David Terry, Melissa McMahon.

Playwrights: Frederick Stroppel, Theresa Rebeck, Joe Pintauro
Director: Kim Hardwick

Publicist: Phillip Terry

Australian Premiere: Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney. April 7, 2004.


The Lowdown:
13 characters, six actors, six plays and three writers. This project started with a group of actors meeting weekly to re-activate some creative juices. This evening of short plays was the result.


Sydney Morning Herald Review:
This evening of six short plays by three American playwrights offers an adequately entertaining range of character comedy with the odd flash of real acting flair.

Divided between six actors, each play is a contemporary slice of American life and they range in subject matter from prostitution to kidney transplants; from Stepford wives to neurotic Zen-tragics.

What stands out all night is the writing. Confident, delectable and exuberant sections of dialogue by all three playwrights give great strength to the production.

The acting, however, falters in parts with some actors more potent than others. All the plays are performed with American accents with reasonable success but, because one actor, Rebecca Rocheford Davies, is American-born, her natural tones provide a vocal yardstick that no-one quite reaches.

First up is Harvest Time, one of two plays by Frederick Stroppel. Mike is on a kidney dialysis machine and his brother, who has offered his kidney for Mike's life-saving transplant, is threatening to sell it elsewhere on eBay. While the pair ground this outlandish scenario in humorous plausibility, it feels uncomfortably like a television sitcom played onstage.

Next up, Katie and Frank is buoyed only by David Terry's energy as a pompous husband brought to violent task by his wife.

The play with the best mix of performance and writing is Smoke Out by Stroppel. It's funny the second Rocheford Davies's 40-something sentimentalist, Faith, walks out in her ill-fitting winter coat, back-combed Jackie Kennedy hair and scrunchy, happy face. She meets the sullen Crystal, a co-worker in their city building, who sends Faith's day-glo romanticism into a spin with tales of sex, drugs and who the boss is sleeping with.

Later, Soft Dude tells of Doll, a prostitute, and Dude, her lover, who can only have paid sex with other prostitutes. Both were abused as children by a parent and now, as adults, their fear of emotional intimacy is hijacking the relationship's future. Rocheford Davies as Doll is again very watchable. Her bristling interactions with Damian Foley are excellently paced and she does well to convey the vulnerable woman her tough-chick exterior hides.

The multipurpose set featuring large-scale black-and-white photographs of New York streets is a promising idea but it overcrowds the stage. Kim Hardwick's direction runs hot and warm and you sense her levels of enthusiasm changing for different plays.


Production Shots:
None Available


Further Information:
None Available