RGM Artist Group

SUNEETA PERES DA COSTA

Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1976. In 1998 she graduated with First Class Honours and the University Medal from the Bachelor of Arts in Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, and in 2001, as Fulbright Scholar to the USA, received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. She is currently undertaking a PhD on Joyce at The University of Sydney.

Her radio plays, Watermark, Angelina's Song, Children See Everything, Fire and Water have been produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Art of Straying, a stage play, was read at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts by the Bat Theatre in August 2000 and workshopped at the 1999 and 1998 National Playwrights' Conferences in Canberra; it was shortlisted for the 2000 Griffin, and Patrick White, Playrwright's Awards. Another stage play, Klactoveesedstene was shortlisted for the 2001 Griffin Playwright's Award.

Peres da Costa received the 1998 Ian Reed Foundation Prize for Radio Drama; the 1998 New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Writers in the Park New Writer's Fellowship; the 1996 New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award, and she was twice awarded first place in the Sydney Theatre Company-ICI Young Playwrights' Award for her plays Free Men (1996) and I am an Island (1995): both plays were subsequently given staged readings at the Sydney Theatre Company.

I am an Island was produced in 1996 by the Australian Theatre for Young People and in the same year Suneeta wrote, directed and co-performed Blood is Blue for the Belvoir St Asian Theatre Festival.

THE ART OF STRAYING

1940. The occupation of Paris by the Gestapo suddenly turns German-Jewish cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin into a fugitive. With a group of refugees he is detained overnight in a hotel at the Franco-Spanish border, destined to depart for a concentration camp the next morning.

Throughout the night Benjamin (suffering from angina), has hallucinatory flashbacks which collide prophetically with the present.

In addition to its previously biographical theme, The Art Of Straying allegorises the fate of the international political refugee.

KLACTOVEESEDTENE

A fictional meeting between Charlie Parker and Sigmund Freud, Klactoveesedstene is ideally a play for voices.

Somewhere on a train between Manhattan and Paris on June 5, 1939, the great psychiatrist and musical genius are brought by chance together. In the course of the analysis, transference and counter-transference, Parker faces up to the past from which he is running and Freud finds he has lost much more than his chow.

2 males

WATER

In Water we are privy to the babbling stream of consciousness of Neal Lily. While washing dishes, making love to his libidinous girlfriend, Melanie, and going for a post-coital walk in the Darwin rain, Neal reflects on a mysterious and irresolvable incident in his past.

a monologue for 1 male voice

FIRE

A companion piece to Water, Fire features the unconscious, but inflammatory thoughts of Kate, a reconstructed pyromaniac. Incarcerated for incendiary crimes, she attempts to distinguish the difference between anger and desire.

a monologue for 1 female voice

ANGELINA'S SONG

Angelina looks out on the water at Bucau in occupied East Timor, remembering those that she has lost to exile and to death. Her daughter, Sylvia, appears to her in dream.

a monologue in verse for 2 female voices

CHILDREN SEE EVERYTHING

A woman observing her children playing turns a blind eye but cannot stop them witnessing a neighbour's child being taken from his family.

a monologue for 1 female voice

WATERMARK

A daughter remembers being taught to swim by her Father; a Mother asks the daughter an unanswerable question. Memory claims each except the Father, who is claimed by the sea.

3 actors: 1 male, 2 female

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