Karin Mainwaring – October 22 2017

Karin has worked in most areas of theatre including stints as an usher, actor and stage manager. She grew up in Adelaide, trained as an actress at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and currently lives in the ghost-town Tambaroora, near the old mining town of Hill End, inland New South Wales. Karin’s work is characterised by the darkness of its humour and the verbal fluency, cruelty and violence of her language. Her playwriting credits include Long Time…No See, a scorching comedy set in drought stricken outback Australia; Binge, a play about eating disorders and family secrets, drawing on her own experience of bulimia; and Stiffs, an urban comedy about a desperate junkie, Angel, planning to bump off her mother whilst force-feeding a truckload of lies to her deaf-mute sister and her sister with a ‘reality by-pass’. Her works in progress are a coast-based play, Dead People Are My Only Love, and Deirdre Does Daylesford, wherein a ghost-town bound playwright plans her ESCAPE!

Whatever Happened to Deirdre Wheeler?
2013 first reading at The Rex Community Theatre, Daylesford, Victoria
Full length play; 2 female 1 male
Script available by permission of the author – contact me.
In the words of dramaturge Wayne Harrison, this black-comedy about a pair of twisted-sisters “contains some of the darkest, funniest writing Australian theatre has ever produced”. The title role of Deirdre Wheeler (‘Wheels’) – a one-time, on-the-“brink-of-greatness”-actress, now wheelchair bound wash-up – was written for wheelchair-user actress Kate Hood, and the role of Baby-Doll Wheeler (‘Doll’) – a vain, implacable, drunken leech – was written for Karin herself. Part blue-print, part script and part score, the play’s first reading in August 2013 was advertised as being “for grown-ups [with a] robust attitude to language, sex, booze, and damage (physical and mental). And, let’s not forget, comedy, because, over and above anything and everything else, we want to make you laugh!”

The Rain Dancers (published in ‘Sydney Theatre Company: plays 1’)
Five Islands Press, 1998; ISBN 0864185529
(trans. Jean-Pierre Richard with title the Les danseurs de la pluie; Lansman, 1995)
Two Acts; 3 female; 1 male
An outback tragi-comedy dealing with confusion and misunderstanding. Dan, the man, comes home to a run-down and isolated outback station after a 25-year absence. He returns to the three significant women in his life – his mother, his wife and his daughter. The country is deep in drought. For the women, who haven’t really seen a man for 25 years, it has been a drought of a different kind. His wife, Rita, has been concentrating her venom in his absence. The last thing she expects to feel is her love for him. The drought breaks with tragic consequences for all. Karin became the first Australian playwright to have work produced by the Comedie Francaise, Paris, when The Rain Dancers was produced at Theatre du Vieux Colombier in April 2001.