Undulating Ungulate

Another offering from the ever-interesting Playground Collective.

Katydid focuses on a young woman with cerebral palsy who wants to escape the family home, and her parents, isolated from each other and the outside world, who are being driven into the ground caring for her. They get a young man in as extra help to care for her, spurring change in the closed dynamics.

It is really good. Lots of it is no fun. Partly because the tensions of caregiving within the family are all too familiar to me, and the writer clearly has firsthand experience of it. Katydid explores an emotionally devastated wasteland of family relations around the largely closed off world of living with disabilities, and teases out the shades of gray really well. It balances all this out with enough genuine humour to make it tolerable.

On reflection I have issue with its third act, but on the whole this is one of the very best pieces of local theatre I’ve seen, with some fearless performances. It is only on a couple more days, though may return? At any rate the Saturday matinee show is probably the only one with tickets left now…

Filed by billy at 2:28 pm under culture
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