WAY REVIEW 23 March 2023 ***

THEATRE

Written & performed by Sally McKenzie

At La Mama Courthouse until April 2, 2023

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***

This review is published only on this blog. I'll give a radio review on Arts Weekly, 3MBS, on Sat 1 April 2023. KH

Sally McKenzie in WAY pic by Darren Gill

In her solo play, WAY, Sally McKenzie embodies four older women, all of whom face straitened circumstances and find themselves without a home and facing alarming financial hardship.

 

WAY, written by McKenzie and directed simply and deftly by Sean Mee, traces the path of Lyn, a documentary filmmaker who struggles to find funding for her film about women over 55 who become homeless. In some cases, when one little thing goes wrong in their lives, it can lead to a cascade of adverse consequences. McKenzie is committed to telling their stories, honouring their trust in her and helping to change the circumstances of these and other homeless women.

 

With just a change of voice, posture and cardigan, McKenzie shifts between Lyn’s three interview subjects, each of whom travelled a different path to homelessness but all of whom experience fear, shame and a loss of identity and dignity. They have become invisible.

 

Lily is fragile, birdlike, suffers with ADHD, sleeps in a phone box, craves order and cannot manage the detail of everyday life much less dealing with housing offices; Maysie sells items she finds dumped outside homes in Toorak and is saving to move to a tiny house; Zahra was a well-heeled lawyer with a flourishing practice and plenty of financial assets but, after a damaging marriage, she slid into gambling and lost everything.

 

Meanwhile, Lyn is fraught when she loses her casual teaching hours, cannot secure film funding and cannot pay her rent. Her obsession with finishing her film leads her to borrow money from her elderly mother. It’s all downhill from there.

 

Performing on a set of just boxes and phone booth and an upstage projection screen, McKenzie is a versatile and capable performer who captures the vulnerability, isolation and shame of these women who have fallen on hard times for so many reasons. Her entire persona changes as she shifts between characters. McKenzie does not spend time making us weep. Rather she wants to make us think and act - a very Brechtian sentiment.

 

 

The script draws on real stories and facts about the housing crisis for older women in Australia. It is moving and impassioned and detailed. A niggling problem is that characters unnecessarily repeat their dialogue, and the script needs some editing to tighten it and remove this extraneous dialogue.

 

WAY certainly achieves its goal of raising awareness about this burning issue of women who find themselves homeless, without easy access to personal support and financial and housing solutions. It will make you think and, perhaps, want to take some action.

by Kate Herbert

 

Written by Sally McKenzie

Directed by Sean Mee

Performed by Sally McKenzie

Sound Design by J. David Franzke

Lighting Design by Clare Springett

Produced by theCoalface