Published: 12 October 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Steve Meacham reports on a new series of live theatrical “read-throughs” featuring emerging Australian Jewish writers. First up, Brian Fine’s play based on a confronting incident at a Sydney pub
A YOUNG, WELL-DRESSED MAN sits on a bench, staring morosely towards the horizon of the immense Pacific Ocean near The Gap, one of Sydney’s most popular tourist views, but also a notorious suicide location.
An older beaten and busted man, sensing a fellow soul in crisis, confronts him in conversation, but not kindly.
“The older man becomes animated,” explains Brian Fine.
He verbally attacks the younger man, accusing him of disrespect: “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? Don’t you recognise me?”
So begins Bridging The Gap, Fine’s first play which will be given its debut reading at ARA Darling Quarter theatre tomorrow (Wednesday Oct 14).
Born in South Africa but having lived in Australia for the past 32 years, Fine was - and remains - a highly successful entrepreneur who sold his stake in a retail chain found in most Australian malls in 1996. (“Don’t mention the name,” he insists.)
His wife, Wendy, is far more famous, Fine insists. Her series of musical forays for energetic primary school kids has gone globally viral. (Wendy has been very supportive, he says, “helping me with the editing”.)
Bridging The Gap is the result of Fine’s seven-year struggle to produce a piece that began as an ugly encounter, became a short story and has metamorphosed into a play-in-the-making.
That’s thanks to the guidance of friend Moira Blumenthal, founder of Australia’s premier Jewish theatre company, and Sydney-born, New York-based musical powerhouse Alexis Fishman.
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Fishman - actress, singer, playwright, cabaret coach and now co-producer of Moira Blumenthal Productions - last performed on stage in Sydney in May, with her stand-out show, Amy Winehouse: Resurrected, a stunning depiction of arguably the greatest but most tragic Jewish singer-songwriter of the 21st century.
But back to Fine. “The genesis of the whole thing was six or seven years ago, outside the Coogee Bay Hotel,” he says.
An older man, down on his luck, asked a group of younger men emerging from the hotel for some money. The younger men’s reaction was foul-mouthed and unemphatic.
When the older man said, “do you have any idea who you’re talking to? Don’t you recognise me?”, the abuse got worse. Fine never discovered who the celebrity down-and-out was, or his life story, but filed the incident away in his artistic memory.
“Everyone has the right to say no to someone requesting money,” Fine says. “But no-one has the right to be that abusive.”
Later, when Fine happened to be walking at The Gap, the grist of a story starting milling in his brain. “Since that night outside the Coogee Bay Hotel, I’d often thought about the incident and what the older man meant,” Fine says.
“Who was that guy? How could he be so insulted? How can I make him something again?”
Having recently completed a writing course, Fine started jotting down the first draft of a short story. It was never meant to be a play, Fine confesses.
But he asked his friend Blumenthal to critique it - and she felt it had the makings of a performed piece. “Moira loved the dialogue, but felt it was not written in ‘play language’,” Fine continues.
Several drafts later - mostly during COVID-19 when Fine was confined largely to the family home in Rose Bay - Blumenthal and Fishman gave it their seal of approval.
So Bridging the Gap is the first in a daring new series of live theatrical “read-throughs” to be programmed in the next few months by Moira Blumenthal Productions in a series called Second Stage.
So Bridging the Gap is the first in a daring new series of live theatrical “read-throughs” to be programmed in the next few months by Moira Blumenthal Productions in a series called Second Stage.
Read-throughs are a long-honoured tradition off-Broadway, Fishman points out from her home in Westchester, north of NYC in the Hudson Valley. (“We’re in the ‘burbs,” she says, though Westchester is one of the wealthiest counties in New York State.)
Read-throughs, Fishman explains, “are an opportunity to see plays in the raw. They’re more casual and cheaper.”
There are no sets, no costumes, no props, no movement in a typical read-through, but it is still live theatre, says Fishman.
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The alternative - as many theatrical companies around the world since COVID-19 have embraced - was to produce online productions to be watched via the safety of your own home.
But Blumenthal and Fishman rejected that: “Personally our preference is for live theatre.” Hence this Covid-separated audience for Fine’s debut as a first-time playwright.
“We’re calling for content from the community,” Fishman continues. “We have already received lots of submissions. Not only plays, but poems and short stories, some of which we plan to produce in a theatrical way.
“It’s cool that people that are prepared to share their Jewish stories, and we’re looking for more.”
Meanwhile, Fine is bashful. “I’m not a playwright, just a person who wrote a story which ended up as a play,” he insists.
Bridging The Gap has come a full circle from that original scene outside the Coogee Bay Hotel.
In the read-through version, the audience will be introduced to a young Jewish man, son of a rabbi, who is gay. Obviously, both characters in the two-man dialogue are complete figment of Fine’s imagination, inspired by that initial encounter outside Coogee Bay Hotel and lost souls he’s seen walking around some of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs.
The older man is an indigenous elder who has been through his own tribulations and is eager to prevent another tragedy.
“There are twists at the end,” Fine reveals. “Neither man is what they seem.”
The Gap is an obvious reference to anyone who lives in Sydney. “But the bridges are between white and black, gay and straight, Jew and aboriginal, rich and poor,” says Fine. “Those are the bridges I was trying to build in this play.”
Bridging The Gap, ARA Darling Quarter Theatre, Oct 14, 3pm and 7pm.
