AUSART GIVING DAY
APT believes we need our playwrights now more than ever. Playwrights use theatre as a testing ground for the difficult, urgent, exuberant conversations that are essential for understanding what values we want to live by, both individually and as a collective, which are critical to enacting change in meaningful ways. It is because of playwrights that theatre can play a vital role in articulating and shaping the rapid change we are currently facing.
Join us for The Long Game this AusArt Giving Day.
Image: mid-development of Michele Lee’s work ‘Chu’s Party’ as part of the Untold Stories Program in 2023. Photo credit: Jack Dixon-Gunn. Featured in photo: Zoe Boesen
The Long Game—celebrating the journey from spark to stage and supporting bold new Australian plays.
The room is quiet. Half-empty coffee cups. Pages everywhere- some crossed out, some circled, some held together by hope and a bulldog clip. A playwright reads a line aloud. It’s not great yet. The dramaturg scribbles a note. A silence stretches too long. Someone finally says, “Let’s keep this one alive.” That’s where every great play begins- not on stage, but in the in-between. The mess. The rework. The endless rewriting until something starts to breathe.
And that – right there – is the moment we’re losing. Because the long game of making theatre rarely gets funded. APT exists to protect that space – to make sure the writing, the revising, the brave, bad first drafts have room to grow. Australia’s stages are filled with brilliance, but brilliance doesn’t start under the lights. It starts in drafts. In workshops. In the quiet, fragile space between first thought and first performance.
It starts with people who are willing to invest in the unglamorous bit. The bit that happens before the applause.
This AusArts Day, Thursday October 23, we’re inviting you to make a donation that invests in The Long Game of Australian play development. You’re not just supporting the arts, you’re joining us for the table read. The workshops, and the post-its, the commas, slashes and cuts. The process of an idea being forged into something that lives and breathes on our stages.
Australian plays are brilliant, and they start here.