Sydney Theatre Company and Investec Bank present
ZEBRA!
by Ross Mueller
New York City. Winter. 2009
The global housing bubble has well and truly burst, leaving the inhabitants of the previously buoyant city deflated and contemplating the impending age of austerity. While CNN reports that ruined New Yorkers have begun to exchange goods for services, trading iPods for cab rides, the deal of the century is going down in a Manhattan bar called ‘The Big House’.
At his daughter’s request, businessman Larry has agreed to a blind date with her fiancée. He’s expecting a ‘kid’ to show up. What he is not expecting is Jimmy, a former elite Beach Volleyball player, who has made his name in real estate on the West Coast. These two self-made men are going to have to do business. With the subprime mortgage crisis hitting hard, Jimmy has only one thing left to sell: Himself.
Apart from the soon-to-be in-laws, the bar is empty. Its owner, Robinson, is in the depths of an emotional and fiscal crisis of her own but when this chance meeting blows the unpredictable Larry in her direction, the course of her future might be set to change.
Commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company, ZEBRA! is a new play from Australian playwright Ross Mueller (The Ghost Writer, Construction of the Human Heart). In 2009 Ross’s play Concussion premiered in our Next Stage Season and now we will bring his work to our Main Stage audience for the first time.
He’s a writer whose work is characterised by an acute sense of urgency and distinct contemporaneity. His dialogue canters at an astounding pace, leaping from the mouths of characters so sharply drawn that Bryan Brown and Colin Friels put their hands up to play Jimmy and Larry.
We’ve seen the plays about how and why the Global Financial Crisis happened. Now Ross’s fast-paced, midlife crisis comedy progresses the dramatic discourse by ruminating on who we are post-GFC. What has plummeting from the dizzy heights of prosperity done to us as a society and as individuals? How has humiliating failure altered our self image? Will Australia’s obsessive love affair with all-things-American end acrimoniously in the wake of the fall? It may be messy, painful and ugly but this struggle to be the alpha-stallion on the plain will also be a funny, uproarious night in the theatre.
2 hours, no interval
Venue: Wharf 1
