THE COMPREHENSIVE A-Z OF MISSING PERSONS AUSTRALIA
An exploration of the quiet crisis of Missing Persons.
Why do so many Australians go missing? Do they want to be found?
Each year 55,000 people go missing in Australia and this figure is growing. Most of those who are reported missing are found within a short period of time, thousands are not. Mysteries swell and closure never comes. Why do so many Australians go missing? Do they want to be found? And why do young people make up a disproportionate number of those missing?
The issue of missing persons in Australia is complex and multifaceted, with nuanced mental health challenges often underlying why people vanish. Chow’s work honours this complexity, humanising the grainy photographed faces pasted on missing person posters, positing backstories and attempting to really see those who were “last seen…” as more than newspaper headlines or plotlines in a Channel 7 documentary.
The play centres on Em Wells, a young radio host living with the spectre of a missing loved one and coping in the only way she knows how. Em has befriended Tassie, a personified Tasmanian Tiger. An animal that is of course extinct yet regularly sighted; a species that is gone but evades the psyche of Australia. Tassie and Em are playing a dangerous game – will Tassie convince Em to go missing too? Against this struggle, surreal scenes and verbatim reports weave together the stories of long-term missing Australians, from Aaron Clear to Zoran Kostantinnovic. The play shares moments of hope with suggestions of community solutions that might keep our young people feeling safe and secure.
The relevance to young people demands that the story is told by a young playwright, performed by a large youth ensemble, and produced by the State’s youth theatre company. An intelligent contemporary Australian voice, Chow was awarded the prestigious Griffin Award (2022), for her play The Promise Land. Paired up with WAYTCo’s Artistic Director, Amelia Burke, the two make an exciting creative force.
A cast of ten WAYTCo Youth Members aged 18 to 26 will walk beside an experienced group of creatives and designers to bring Chow’s work to life. With Fiona Bruce on set and costume designer, David Stewart on sound, lighting designer Matthew Erren and audio-visual designer Roly Skender, the cast and creative team will work across disciplines, utilising physical theatre, verbatim, and multimedia.
Inherent in the work is a call to better look out for one another, as family members, friends, and neighbours. Join us in addressing this unspoken crisis, one that disproportionately affects our young people.
Season: 19-30 November 2024
Venue: The Liberty Theatre
Run Time: 70mins
The Liberty Theatre is an old abandoned site. To find out how to navigate the space, watch this short photographic tour, or ‘access walkthrough’:
This new Australian play was seeded in WAYTCo’s inaugural 2024 Summer Stage, an annual new works incubator designed to help identify ideas to take through to main production.
This commission and premiere production is made possible thanks to a major gift from the Pamela Sawyer Estate, a 2024 ARTSImpact Minor Grant and Creative Australia through the Plus 1 Program. The production budget is also boosted by the generous support of Alison Morley, M Watts Legal, Brian & Gemma Kelly, Sophie Chamberlain,Tania Hudson, June Moorhouse, Alica Byford, the Vakatini Family. The project is sponsored by brand partner Kool Kreative and print partner Minuteman Press Perth.
Banner image by Sam de Souza