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Broken

Playwright: Mary Anne Butler
Year: 2015
Type: Play
Edition: Brown's Mart Theatre, 2015. Currency (forthcoming) 2015

Synopsis

Broken entwines three disparate lives as they shatter across a single fateful night in the heart of Australia's desert country. 

Midnight. Central desert. A Troop-Carrier rolls through the bush, trapping its sole occupant- Ash- upside-down, inside the car. Ham- a local SES volunteer- comes across the accident. He CBs into Alice Springs for an ambulance and goes into emergency response: cutting Ash loose from the car, stabilising her, administering CPR.

In a house on a rural block outside Alice Springs, Mia is gripped by grinding stomach cramps; enough to bring a woman to her knees. She's alone way out here, trying to hang on to the tiny life growing inside her.

Ash finally gasps her way back to life- broken, but intact. Ham waits for the ambulance to arrive and does what he's trained to do: bandages her bleeding head, splints her broken leg, lights a fire to ward off the night. He keeps her talking, cracks bad jokes, takes her mind off herself. Makes her feel warm, and safe.

Mia hangs on to her baby with everything she's got. If her husband were here, he'd know how to help. He's trained for it. But he's not here. And she has no idea where he is.

As a single fraught night unfolds, time shifts on its axis and three worlds collide: from the past to the present, and back again- scattering broken pieces of empty along the way.

Broken wrestles with matters of chance, choice, hope and fate, posing the question: When you find yourself empty, how do you start again? (australianplays.org)

Narrative Locations

A house, Alice Springs region, Northern Territory  

Temporal setting: 2015

Location notes:

Ash and Ham's home on a rural block is a fair drive outside of Alice Springs, and the sense of isolation is painfully clear during Ash's tormented miscarriage. Coordinates given are a rough approximation.

This setting, lonely, isolated and empty in the present day, is contrasted with Ash's memories of first coming to this home with Ham, when it was a place to be shared and cherished. 

Quotes

MIA: Then one morning he tells me to get in the car. 

HAM: Sun bleeds orange-red over the horizon, leaking life back into the world.

 MIA: Won’t tell me where we’re going, says it’s a surprise. 

HAM: The road sings straight and true before me. I watch the white lines rushing past, telling their own stories: traffic and life and human hearts traversing across the country... 

MIA: He drives to this block way out of town… 

HAM: carrying the weight of dreams and hope and chance and choice. 

MIA: pops some champagne and asks me how I like my new home.

(p. 32)



Central Desert, MacDonnell, Northern Territory  

Temporal setting: 2015

Location notes:

Ash rolls her car near the side of highway, in the middle of emptiness. Playwright Mary Anne Butler writes in the production script of Broken that this crash takes place in the Central desert near Hermannsburg. Coordinates are approximate. 

A sense of emptiness is at the core of Broken, both in the setting and the characters. The three characters in the play are aching with emptiness, and this is informed by and reflected in the starkness of their surroundings.

Butler says in an interview: "As soon as I came to the NT, the size and scope and power and beauty and danger and tenuousness of this vast, largely unpopulated landscape- Top End, coastal areas, desert- impacted on my work; I guess in part because NT characters now so strongly feature in my work, and they are a product of this environment." (interview with Artback http://www.artbacknt.com.au/index.php/broken-qa-mary-anne-butler/)

Quotes

ASH: The silence. A roo stares in at me through the upside-down night, red-eyed and frightened. Moon outside the windowframe, hanging there all yellow and pocked. 

MIA: Nothing for miles. No-one. 

ASH: You know this road. Just biologists and mad people. The odd tourist following a GPS into nothingness. Council workers, once a year, to grade the road where it turns to dirt. Vast tracts of emptiness. …just… me.

(p. 4)


HAM: If you listen hard enough, you can even hear the stars falling. Something once whole, spinning through the cosmos. …disintegrating…

(p. 6)





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