Patricia Cornelius – August 7 2016

Dying to Know Day – August 8 2016

D2K Day is an annual day of action dedicated to bringing to life conversations and community actions around death, dying and bereavement.

Patricia is a playwright, novelist, film writer, writing teacher, dramaturge, and founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre. Her plays include Savages – a look at masculinity and misogyny amongst four ordinary young men; Boy Overboard – an adaptation of the young adult novel by Morris Gleitzman; The Flying Emu (and Other Stories) – an adaptation of three stories by Sally Morgan for very small children; Opa! – a sexual odyssey about Penelope awaiting the return of husband Odysseus; Max – about an intellectually disabled man whose mother left home with him when the family wanted him institutionalised; and Oh My God I’m Black! – a one-woman cabaret-style monologue devised with Maryanne Sam and Irine Vela. Other plays include Wildcat Falling – about an Aboriginal recidivist in the 1960s and Lilly and May – the story of two lesbian bag ladies debunking the commonly held belief in eccentricity. Of nearly 30 plays only one work has never been produced, an opera titled Cunning written in collaboration with composer Irine Vela. Patricia has also written a novel, My Sister Jill, and a screenplay of the 2009 film Blessed, based on Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, co-written with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas.

Do Not Go Gentle … published with her play The Berry Man
Currency Press, 2010; ISBN 9780868199078
Full length play; 2 female, 3 male
Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ – a passionate clarion call to live life to its utmost, even into old age – provides the starting point for this play and Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition is used as a metaphor for the elusive journey of five elderly people facing the final leg of their journey in a nursing home. Scott’s passage across the Antarctic, as he confronts a landscape of ice and perilous weather, powerfully parallels their courage and inevitable defeat. Yet with unbroken spirit, this funny, angry, defiant group grapple with the big questions of life as, to use the words of Thomas’s refrain, they ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’.

Love
Australian Script Centre, 2005; ISBN 9780992383855
70 minutes, 2 female, 1 male
Young adult – adult
Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo are on the bottom of the heap. They’re young but already the youth has been wrung out of them. They’ve been abused, they’re abusive, and they’re difficult to like let alone to love. But it is love in all its distorted and mutated forms that holds them together. Annie and Tanya make a pact; their love will protect them from an unloving world and it will endure. Even the dreadful and charming Lorenzo will not threaten it. Only doubt in each other’s love can put a wedge between them. “This is theatre at its most riveting… In Cornelius’ capable hands, what could have been the last gasp of a genre in decay becomes a miraculous but painful resuscitation — pure Narcan.” Cameron Woodhead, The Age