Singing the Lonely Heart and Ozone: Two plays

Singing the Lonely Heart is loosely based on the life of American writer Carson McCullers. This Gothic fantasia reveals Alana Valentine's engagement with a compelling magic realist style. Set in Columbus, Georgia, in the late 1920s, the play opens at a travelling freak show, where Carson first becomes aware of her sense of difference. It goes on to depict an unconventional Southern upbringing and its inevitable clash with the narrow-minded attitudes of small town America-particularly its racial and sexual prejudices. Out of this conflict Carson emerges as a character who is at once disarmingly frank and worldly yet strangely innocent and affecting.

In Ozone, a man has been stripped of his skin just as the world is being stripped of its protective membrane of life-saving ozone. But flying back with him to Australia are four deal-makers who have in their power the ability to reverse both his and the globe's fate. Or do they? A surreal and hilarious comic farce meets a deadly environmental thriller in this compelling drama which fuses the pain of love with the horrors of global warming.