Broken

  Photo: Katie Saunders

  Mary Anne Butler is a Darwin-based playwright whose play Broken won the 2016 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama, the 2014 Northern Territory Literary Award for Best Script, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Theatre Award. Broken premiered to a sold-out season at Brown’s Mart Theatre (March 2015), with a 2016 season in Sydney at Darlinghurst Theatre Company.

  Her play Highway of Lost Hearts (Currency Press, 2014) premiered at the 2012 Darwin Festival to a sold-out season, with a 2013 Brown’s Mart Theatre return season by demand, and a three-month national tour in 2014 (Artback NT). In 2015 it was adapted to a four-part radio series for Radio National’s Radiotonic. Mary Anne’s feature screenplay Hopetown won the 2012 Birch Carroll and Coyle Screenwriting Award, and her stage play Dragons won the 2010 Darwin Festival Script Award. She has also been awarded two month-long Bundanon Trust artist residencies for playwriting in 2016 and 2010.

  Mary Anne is a 2014 Churchill Fellow, a member of the Australian Writers’ Guild Playwrights’ Committee, peer advisor to the Australia Council for the Arts and co-Artistic Director of Knock-em-Down Theatre Company. She holds a Masters in Arts Education and a Master of Philosophy (Creative Writing).

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  Mary Anne Butler has just been awarded the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Drama for Broken. This is one of the most significant recognitions a playwright can receive in this country. This is after she had already received the Northern Territory Literary Award for Best Script. As if these two awards weren’t enough, Mary Anne has also been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature. She is the first playwright to do so. Broken was judged as the best and most significant literary work across all forms of literature for 2016. This is a stunning achievement for Mary Anne but it is also significant for playwriting itself. So often regarded as the lesser form of literature, compared with the novel or poetry, the award is a reminder of just how powerful and important the dramatic form can be. So what is it about this particular work that has demanded such attention?

  In a whirlwind of interwoven rhythm, the playwright draws us into three brutal experiences: a car accident on an isolated desert road, a stillbirth and a dying relationship. In a beautifully controlled use of language she puts us right there. We’re in that ‘troopy’ as it rolls through desert scrub. We hover between life and death with the driver. We feel the ‘serrated dagger slicing through my belly/ from navel to cunt and back again’, and we hold that dead unready child in the palm of our hand with the woman who has lost it through miscarriage. We’re caught in that dead relationship, with the man wanting to pack a bag and walk out the door but we’re held there, like him, by something we can’t quite name: pain, guilt and in the end our humanity. This is exquisite writing. It’s immediate. It’s lean. It’s poetic. It’s visceral. It takes you right into the heart of the experiences it describes.

  The playwright is working with an equilateral triangle here. It’s a three-hander, an ensemble piece with each character given as much weight and importance as the others and each side of the triangle supporting the other two. Like similar works such as Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus, there is inherent strength in the architecture of the piece. The narrative is relatively straightforward. A woman, Ash, rolls her vehicle on an isolated desert highway. A man, Ham, is contemplating leaving his relationship whilst he’s on his way home after some weeks away for work, when he discovers the accident. He rescues Ash from the wreck and comforts her until the emergency services arrive. Something passes between them as they warm each other in the desert cold. An intimacy both of them are lacking in their lives, unexpectedly discovered in the arms of a stranger. Meanwhile, somewhere else on the same night, Mia is alone as she experiences a traumatic miscarriage whilst she is waiting for her partner to return from working away, unsure whether he will or not or even if she wants him to. Gradually, it dawns on us that the three are connected. The man, Ham, who has rescued the woman, Ash, is returning to his partner, Mia, who is losing her child.

  Unlike Friel and O’Rowe however, who unfold their respective narratives in separate but related monologues, Butler fragments and interweaves her three narrative lines to stunning effect. The careful shaping and intercutting of the monologues allows the language describing the violence of a car accident to simultaneously describe the stillbirth and the dying relationship. Similarly, the experience of the stillbirth describes the experience of being in a car accident and so on. Each experience comes to reflect and describe the other two. Whilst each is particular to itself, the violence and pain being described is shared between all three. This is key to why Broken is such an effective piece of writing. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

  In the use of interwoven self-narrated interior monologues and a fragmented narrative structure, Broken explores the idea of isolation. Form reflects content in the use of the singular voice isolated from others in the space and narrative. The dramatic conceit is based on the ironic revelation that whilst each character seems caught in their literal and metaphoric respective states of isolation, the plot places them in the same place and time and draws unexpected points of connection between them. The eventual revelation of this triangle of connection is entirely satisfying.

  A quality of good dramatic writing, perhaps any writing, is that it creates unexpected juxtapositions between ideas or events or even characters, in a way that creates greater or more profound meaning. The playwright does this here by juxtaposing a violent car accident with a stillbirth. Each a horrific experience on its own, but conflated here, they are all the more powerfully felt as the two, in effect describe each other. Into this potent mix she weaves a more contemplative portrait of a dying relationship. The effect she achieves is that whilst seemingly on the surface a subtler and more protracted event, the slow death of a relationship is just as violent and literally painful as the accident or the stillbirth.

  A sense of landscape permeates the play. It is set in and around Alice Springs and the feel of the desert leaps off the page. Although Mary Anne lives in Darwin, and the Top End is a very different place with a very different feel to the desert, this is not the work of an outsider who is just passing through. You sense that she knows the place she is writing about intimately and she knows the kind of people who find themselves within it, by chance or design. She writes about the landscape powerfully and beautifully and the characters she places within it speak with an authentic voice.

  I first became familiar with Mary Anne’s work when she asked me to launch her earlier play Highway of Lost Hearts. It’s a beautiful piece that tells the story of a woman who has lost her heart, or her ability to feel, after the death of a close friend in a boat accident. She sets out on a journey across the country with her trusted companion, her dog. Along the way, through the people she meets and the situations she encounters, she re-finds her heart, piece by piece, until she reaches the coast and is able to let go of the friend she has lost and to forgive herself. It’s a piece about grief and loss and forgiveness.

  In her ability to set emotionally damaged characters against the strong evocation of landscape, Butler’s work is reminiscent of Tim Winton. Like Winton, her characters seem to both understand the landscape in which they find themselves, and to be shaped by it, whilst simultaneously being at odds with it. Landscape is a trial, a challenge, a danger, which must be overcome and got through in order to survive. However, whilst Winton’s female characters seem to exist primarily to illuminate the emotional journey of his central male characters, Butler writes women with psychological and emotional depth and truth. Both write with unmistakably Australian voices and have a beautiful way with words, that at times, can quite literally tak
e your breath away.

  In receiving such significant national awards, Mary Anne has drawn attention to the strength of writing coming out of regional Australia. I have known her to be a strong advocate for regional writers and writing and in particular for the Northern Territory, both in its Top End and Alice Springs writing communities. She has been persuasive in her arguments about the need for the East Coast metropolitan centres to be aware and receptive to the bold stories being told from places like the Territory. However, the most persuasive argument she makes is through the quality of her own work. Broken will be produced in Sydney in 2016. I imagine it won’t be the last time we see the play. I for one will be making sure I get to Sydney to see it.

  Andrew Bovell

  Willunga, SA

  February 2016

  Andrew Bovell is an award-winning writer for theatre, film and television.

  WRITER’S NOTE

  Broken deals with ‘… luck and chance and choice and fate …’ which could well be a metaphor for how any play manages to get from initial concept through to production, and, ultimately, publication.

  The idea for Broken was seeded in 2007, when a woman rolled her car on the Stuart Highway, the main artery between Darwin and the rest of the country. She was trapped for over thirty-six hours—literally metres from the road—but no-one could see her because the car was hidden behind some scrub. An alert was put out and she was eventually found, alive; one of the lucky ones. Fatal rollovers are common in these parts.

  Then in August 2010, I had a chance conversation with Rik Dove, a Canadian paramedic. He revealed that when ambos come across someone in an accident they will look that person in the eye, reassure them that they won’t be left alone, and—where possible—keep them talking until further help arrives. I asked him if ongoing bonds ever formed from these encounters, and I recall that he said yes, bonds did form; but they weren’t ‘real’ so—ultimately—they had to be relinquished.

  And so began the story of a woman in a rollover (Ash), who is tended to by a passing SES worker (Ham). Across one long night they forge an emotional and physical attachment with knock-on repercussions, which inevitably impact on Ham’s wife Mia.

  In December 2010 I enrolled in a Generative Writing workshop run by writer/director Jenny Kemp. Her inspiring week-long process was pivotal in introducing me to David Mamet’s technique of ‘training to break down the barriers between the unconscious and the conscious mind…’ – leading me towards a poetic style and imagery which my conscious mind may not have found.

  Then in 2011, during a theatre trip to Sydney, I saw Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus. Written as fast-paced tripartite monologues, the immediacy of O’Rowe’s active voice, the rhythm and rhyme of his language, the jigsaw puzzle of information revealed strategically to create tension all combined to unravel me. I started writing Broken as tripartite monologues. While this drew out the characters’ various stories, I also knew that it wasn’t the right structure for this particular work.

  I kept whittling away until the text of Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling fell into my hands a year or so later. I’d seen the Brink Productions show and been blown away by the possibilities inherent in form, but it was the playtext itself—seeing the structure on the page—which led me out of Broken’s tripartite monologues and into a more fragmented shape which better suited the fractured lives of the play’s characters. As Bovell’s play took me seamlessly from the year 2039 to 1959 to 1988 and back again, it taught me that a play can make immense shifts of era and place smoothly and fluidly, as long as the heart of the story remains intact. In the foreword to that publication there is reference to an email from Bovell stating that writing the play was like ‘pissing glass’. For all the blood and pain that went into When the Rain Stops Falling, Broken has been a major beneficiary. I’m grateful to all playwrights whose work I learn from, but particularly in this case to Andrew Bovell for paving the way with the structural innovations inherent in Rain.

  And so I started to listen more closely to what the play itself wanted to be and Broken began to find its own organic shape as the characters collided against each other; their stories fragmenting and weaving together so that the individual parts began to tell the whole.

  By October 2013 I had a draft solid enough to share, and Chris Mead came on board as dramaturg. I still have the notes from our first FaceTime meeting. ‘Furiously hold it to the present,’ he said. ‘Start the play with EACH of the character’s lives being overturned, literally.’ ‘Let your audience see these stories in their immediacy.’ These three notes shifted Broken on its axis, bringing all the action firmly into the present, advancing the structural choices already in train, and sending me back to the ‘show us, don’t tell us’ axiom.

  Broken went on to receive development support from Brown’s Mart Theatre, which provided two weeks on the floor with director Gail Evans and actors Aimee Gray, Kadek Hobman and Ciella Williams. Gail Evans is an extraordinary director: intuitive, whip-smart, and she always places the exploration of the script at the very centre of the process. Those two weeks tested the emotional core and veracity of each of the characters: honing the story down to its very essence and affirming much of what was on the page.

  From there, I did a final edit—worrying away at each word and semicolon until I could feel the piece breathing back at me as a whole; the fragmented voices of each character finally intact four years after they first came to me.

  Broken went on to win the 2016 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama, the 2014 Northern Territory Literary Award for Brown’s Mart Theatre Best Script and was shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Award.

  Funding from the Australia Council Theatre Board, Arts NT Arts Grants Board and Brown’s Mart Theatre saw Knock-em-Down Theatre’s world premiere of Broken hit the Brown’s Mart stage on March 18, 2015—where the season, with the beautiful cast and crew listed in this publication, sold out.

  Sometimes, a play comes along which teaches you more about yourself and your writing process than you can comprehensively articulate. Broken has been such a work. It’s also been a massive team effort, as all plays are.

  Thanks to all those individuals and organisations who have helped Broken to her feet.

  Mary Anne Butler

  Darwin

  January 2016

  Broken was first produced by Knock-em-Down Theatre at the Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, on Tuesday 17 March 2015, with the following cast:

  HAM Matt Edgerton

  ASH Rosealee Pearson

  MIA Ciella Williams

  Director, Gail Evans

  Set and Costume Designer, Kris Bird

  Lighting Designer, Sean Pardy

  Sound Designer, Angus Robson

  Stage Manager, Kelly Blumberg

  ‘Emptiness is the beginning of all things’

  Raymond Carver

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’m indebted to many people and organisations for Broken’s path to production and publication, including:

  Rik Dove for early research.

  Gail Evans and Stephen Carleton of Knock-em-Down Theatre.

  Darwin’s extended creative community, and all writers who have paved the way forward.

  Production manager Vanessa Hutchins and stage manager Kelly Blumberg.

  Glenn Campbell and Paz Tassone for production photos, Artback NT for archival filming, Ciella Williams for poster and front cover design.

  The talented design team: Kris Bird (set and costumes), Sean Pardy (lighting) and Angus Robson (sound).

  Jenny Kemp for the Generative Writing workshop in which the early story took shape.

  Australian Plays Online for originally listing this work electronically.

  All at Currency Press, especially Deborah Franco for her belief in taking Broken to hard copy; Claire Grady and Stefania Cox for publication support.

  Gail Evans—an extraordinary director, crucial to Broken’s script development an
d premiere production.

  Actors Aimee Gray, Kadek Hobman and Ciella Williams for the development; Ciella Williams, Rosealee Pearson and Matt Edgerton for the production, all of whom consolidated the characters and their journeys.

  Chris Mead, whose dramaturgy in the penultimate draft of Broken was pivotal.

  Andrew Bovell for the truly beautiful Introduction to this publication.

  Arts NT and The Australia Council for the Arts for ongoing writing, production and professional development support.

  Brown’s Mart Theatre: Sean Pardy, Kerrin Schallmeiner, Mish Dot, Julie Blyth, Kelly Blumberg and the Brown’s Mart Board.

  To my family: Tess Wilson, Alex Wilson, Sarah Anne Butler and Kate Butler for being an awesome cheer squad. Sarah Butler, Michael Butler, Jennifer Butler and Geoff Mensforth: thank you for your ongoing generosity, support, and belief in my work.

  Mary Anne Butler

  To my siblings: Sarah Butler and Michael Butler

  who have been there

  since the year

  dot.

  CHARACTERS

  ASH, a woman

  HAM, a man

  MIA, a woman

  SETTING

  Central Desert, near Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, Australia.

  A house and block of land, twenty minutes outside Alice Springs.

  Red Centre Highway, Central Desert.

  Era: Now.

  ASH: Late evening.

  A car; rolling, rolling.

  In slow motion.

  Side, roof, other side, wheels / side, roof, other side, wheels.

  Being hurled through the air

  like in the Mondial Rollover.

  Strapped in, mouth open in silent scream:

  upside-down terror.

  The slow-ness of it. The dreamlike tumbling; whip-aired and wondrous.