David Blackman – April 26 2020

Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare – April 29

David is an actor and award-winning writer. He holds a Masters of Screenwriting from RMIT and has written three screenplays and fourteen plays. David moved to New York in 1987 and appeared in over a dozen Off-Broadway plays, including the premiere of Daniel Keene’s The Fighter at Theatre for a New City. He wrote and performed the one-man show Race is the Reason, an exploration of the language of hate across the black and white divide, described by New York’s ‘Village Voice’ as a ‘terrifying and complex meditation on race relations in America’, and in 2014, The Portage of Luke Ruschmeyer to AH won the GunPlays Theatre Competition for plays dealing with gun violence in American culture. David’s other plays include Calley, The Long Day’s Dying, I am Charlie, The Revisionist and most recently, Greater Israel. His first screenplay was Parade’s End and he has recently formed an association with Renegade Films to develop several features, including a screenplay based on the Vietnam War’s epic battle of Long Tan. David’s play scripts are available through the Playwrights’ Center and four have been published by the Australian Script Centre.

Sample image

Enola Gay
Australian Script Centre, 2006
120 minutes, 1 female, 9 male (can be done with an ensemble of 10)
Cast age: 16-18, 18+; Audience age: Young adult, adult
Was the atomic bomb necessary for ending WWII? Enola Gay takes a critical look at events leading up to the use of the first weapon of mass destruction. It follows the experiences of Leo Szilard, the physicist responsible for the groundwork to the Manhattan Project and later its most ardent opponent, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay on its fateful mission, the newly sworn-in President Truman, and Tomoko Nakabayashi, one of the survivors of Hiroshima. This epic play brings to life the conflicting worlds of nuclear physics and the realpolitik of the burgeoning Cold War. It ruthlessly despatches the homilies and myths surrounding the first use of an atomic device on a civilian population.
‘A complex and fascinating play… hums with an explosive intensity.’ – Peter Matheson, dramaturge

Sample image

Eichmann in Jerusalem
Australian Script Centre, 2007
120 minutes, 2 female, 8 male
Cast age: 16-18, 18+; Audience age: Young adult, adult
Dramatisation of three key periods of Adolph Eichmann’s involvement in the Holocaust, as if seen through his less-than-tormented eyes: his role during the Holocaust, his life as a Nazi war criminal on the run, and his time as a captive of the Israeli government awaiting trial and execution. Despite Protestant pastor William Hull’s conviction that Eichmann could be brought onto the path of redemption, Eichmann reaffirms his faith in all the beliefs that brought him to trial, unable or unwilling to accept the depth of his crimes. After he is executed, Argentinian fascists, outraged by his death, kidnap a young Jewess, Gracial Sirota, and brutally disfigure her. As Eichmann leaves this world, expressing his everlasting faith in his own God, she becomes the last victim of his crimes.