Tom Wright – August 28 2016

International Overdose Awareness Day – August 31 2016

Tom is an actor, playwright and dramaturge who has worked with many of Australia’s most respected performing arts companies. He has been involved in Australian theatre since the early 1990s. In that time he has written or co-written a number of plays or adaptations, including The Trial, Ghost Train , The Operated Jew, The Lost Echo (co-written with Barry Kosky and based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses) as well as the pseudo-colonial pantomime, Babes in the Wood. Tom has been Artistic Associate at the Sydney Theatre Company.

Criminology, co-written with Lally Katz
Australian Script Centre; ISBN 9780987392954
Full length; 7 female, 5 male; Audience age: adult
1997: Princess Diana. Mother Theresa. Titanic. While disaster made headlines and the world hurtled toward the next millennium, a death almost went unnoticed in a quiet Canberra home. Law student Anu Singh held a “send off party” after declaring to her friends she had decided to take her own life. Afterwards, she drugged her boyfriend Joe Cinque’s coffee and over the next two days injected him with lethal doses of heroin. What made the crime more shocking was that several of her party guests had known that she’d planned to take someone along for the ride.

Black Diggers
Playlab, 2015; ISBN 9781921390814
Full length; 0 female, 9 male; Audience age: teen – adult
In 1914, young men all over the world enlisted to fight in WWI – including a thousand or so Indigenous Australians, shunned and downtrodden in their own country, and in fact banned by their own government from serving in the military. At a time when Aboriginal people were segregated, unable to vote, and unable to act as their children were stolen from them, there was no heroes’ welcome when they returned from the war – just a shrug, and a return to drudgery and oppression. Black Diggers is the culmination of painstaking research drawn from interviews with the families and conversations with veterans, historians and academics.