Crossed by Chris Summers
Carlton Courthouse until June 19, 2011
Star rating: ***
Some tragic news items stick in our collective consciousness and one of these incidents was the shocking shooting death of a teenager in a Northcote skate park.
Chris Summers’ play, directed by Matt Scholten, is a fictionalised account of the reactions to that tragedy of five very different, but similarly alienated people.
We witness an isolated, middle-aged woman (Jenny Lovell), a Muslim girl (Prag Bhatia), a tough immigrant teenager (Matt Candeland), an equally tough young nationalist (Nick Lineham) and an adventurous, gay teen (Ioan Roberts).
Each has an unexpected but brief encounter with the boy on the day of his death but each experiences the event and its aftermath in totally dissimilar ways, some positively and some negatively.
The story strikes a chord with Melbourne audiences and the performances are strong. The rapid, often panicked dialogue of the five characters is intercut as if it were a docudrama.
The play stalls a little at the end when the style change and the pace slows as we watch the characters in their separate worlds but it is a challenging production.
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