Crushed

Melita Rowston (photo by Dave Quinn)

 By Elissa Blake

Playwright Melita Rowston recalls her teen years being filled with the sounds of hair metal bands - Guns N Roses, Poison, Motley Crue and Skid Row. Growing up in the ‘80s in a beachside Melbourne suburb, she also remembers being haunted by the story of a little girl who was stolen one night from her bed. It’s a memory that has proven hard to shake off.

The crime made headlines and terrified her neighbourhood. “Mum, would say ‘keep your bedroom window closed, you don’t want to get taken’. I was scared, it affected everyone,” Rowston says.

“Our suburb had a lot of bush land and we’d be walking to school or the shops on our own as kids. The idea of ‘stranger danger’ was new then so we were just becoming aware of dangers lurking in bushes.”

Inspired by that incident, Rowston has written Crushed, a fast-paced, darkly comic story about old friends connected by the summer night in 1988 when a not-so-sweet 16-year-old girl disappeared. Twenty years later, the T-shirt the girl was wearing has been unearthed – covered in bloodstains – and as the police comb the ground for more evidence, the surviving friends are forced to confront memories of their adolescence they thought were long buried.

Directed by Lucinda Gleeson, the production features actors Lucy Miller, Sean Barker and Jeremy Waters. Rowston describes it as a “high school reunion from hell”.

“This is a play written for Gen X,” she says. “We were children in the 1970s, raised with parenting ideas about colour and creativity and thinking differently and changing the world. We were told we could do anything and that we had so much choice. There was a lot of excitement but there was also a lot of pressure on us.”

But then the recession hit and the hopes of Gen X were stunted. The term “quarter life crisis” was coined for a generation of twenty-somethings whose hopes seemed to hit a brick wall.

“I like the metaphor that this generation is somehow lost, like the “lost child” in Australian mythology,” Rowston says.

Lucy Miller in Crushed.

A NIDA-trained theatre director, Rowston turned to writing after working at Griffin Theatre, the launch pad for many new Australian plays. Crushed is her fifth full-length play and her first for New Theatre’s Spare Room program, which is dedicated to new Australian work.

“The Spare Room is really supporting new Australian playwrights, and particularly female playwrights and directors, which is so important at the moment. There are a lot of blocks and barriers for women in the industry,” she says. “I’m really enjoying working with like-minded artists who make it all happen somehow.”

Rowston’s next play, The Wonder From Downunder, will also be drawing on memories of her childhood, though rather quirkier ones: giant earthworms. “It will be a very strange one-woman show with holiday slides,” she says. “There are these huge earthworm found only in Gippsland. They grow to something like two metres long and they make the sound of a toilet flushing. It’s really amazing and it’s a great story.”

Crushed plays at the New Theatre until June 9, 2012.

This story was first published in The Sun-Herald, May 20, 2012.