Caleb Lewis – August 12 2018

World Elephant Day – August 12 2018

Caleb is a multi-award-winning writer for the stage. He holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) and has studied at the Flinders University Drama Centre, The Writer’s Room and AFTRS. Caleb has been resident playwright with Melbourne’s Red Stitch Actors Theatre and writer-in-residence with Griffin Theatre. His awards include the inaugural AWGIE and inaugural Richard Burton Award for New Plays. Caleb’s other plays include Men, Love and the Monkeyboy, Dogfall, Death in Bowengabbie, Rust and Bone, Aleksander and the Robot Maid, Tribute, Maggie Stone and Honey Bees. Caleb has led workshops with recent migrants and refugees, and mentored, alongside emerging Indigenous writers through AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) and as a visiting artist with the Aboriginal community of Palm Island. A strong advocate for raising awareness of mental health, Caleb is a long-time partner of the Hunter Institute of Mental Health’s Mindplay Initiative, aimed at educating and empowering young people. Caleb continues to collaborate with students and teachers at numerous schools, universities and other teaching institutions across Australia.

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Clinchfield
Available at http://www.caleb-lewis.com/contact
90 minutes, 3 female, 4 male (variable cast – ideally 16-20)
On September 11, 1916, in St Paul, Virginia, a hotel worker named Red Eldridge was hired as an assistant elephant trainer by the Sparks World Famous Shows Circus. The next day, in Kingsport, Tennessee, he was killed by Mary, a five-ton Asian elephant. The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalism and folklore. What is known is that on the following day a crowd of over 2,500 people assembled atop the Clinchfield Railroad Yard to watch Mary hang. At a time when ‘spectacle’ executions in the U.S. drew crowds of up to 20,000, this bizarre event serves as a crucible in which to study the convergence of Justice and Theatre – and a reckoning with the true purpose of punishment: rehabilitation, restitution or retribution.

Nailed
Australian Script Centre, 2005;
100 minutes; 2 female, 2 male
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: young adult, adult
Australia. 1959. Teenagers, Joe and May, are on the run from the Aboriginal mission where May has been living. With May close to giving birth they take refuge in a stable owned by a childless couple on the run from each other. As the rooster crows, all grapple for the thing that will make them whole. Will the angels intervene to protect the one they love? Nailed is a play about family and love and the things we do out of desperation, a bittersweet love story and a tragedy about damaged people limping towards salvation. It is a story about Faith, when it delivers us and when it fails us.