alexandra collier

The Lag

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:06:24 -0500

In the middle of the night, I woke and shuffled half-awake to the bathroom, with no idea of where I was. I knew I lived somewhere in Brooklyn but surely this wasn’t the place. I tried to recall the faces of my roommates, stared at the dark still shapes of the living room, illuminated by the leaky grey light from the window, but nothing concrete came to mind by the time I had returned to my bedroom.

The night before that I went to bed at 12:00am and woke later on, bright and alert, only to turn over in bed and find that the mean blinking orange of my clock read 1:30am.

I mete out the pretty little sleeping tablets my mum gave me in half portions. They are gone after three days. Or should I say three nights. Because I am not sure what time it is. I flew back from the future and gained a day. In the early evenings, and the mornings, and the afternoons, a strange whirring exhaustion encircles me and I wonder if this is what dying feels like.

I wonder if there is a charity for insomniacs and resolve at 2am that I should donate them a large sum of money for their collective pain.

I realise that all airplane pilots and flight attendants are criminally insane — after all how do they work on a topsy-turvy schedule of sleeplessness? Just know that when a stewardess is smiling at you and asking you what you would like to drink and you ask for extra milk in your tea, she is so exhausted that she probably wants to stab you repeatedly with a small plastic fork.

I flew from a subtropical summer and found myself in New York winter. It makes sense that travelling the world used to take months in a leaky ship because, who the hell are we kidding, the body needs that long to adjust to this inconceivable shift in geography and time.

I feel the drift of sleep tug me and I say yes yes yes please please please but I miss the wave and find myself wide-awake ten minutes later, writing a short rom com in my head that wins me an Oscar. The rom com seems utterly hilarious and original at 3am and so cliché I could weep the next day.

Oh sleep, I miss you. Please can we be friends, again?

Brooklyn to Bondi

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:30:00 -0500

Bondi Beach seems to be the locus of all the world’s most proportionate people: long tanned legs, perfect triangular torsos and the bland and blameless faces of the square jawed, small nosed and high cheek boned. I wonder what ions in the water drew them all to this part of the coastal jag of Australia. Or what series of pinpointable events lead each sculpted-stomached being here (surely there was more to each life story that began with “I was born and decreed to be beautiful” and lead to the inevitable ending: “I live in Bondi”).

I ran this morning along the track that follows the smoothed and hollowed out cliff-faces of Bondi towards Bronte - the ocean whips at the saltwater lap pool at Icebergs, a woman with a Madonna-mike (to be heard over the crash of the waves) guides a yoga class of sweating waifs who salute the big blue, tourists amble and point and slow down in my way along the steps that go up down up down up down as we climb the cliff (please god don’t let me stop running because I’ll never start again). As I round the bend I see the white-toothed gravestones of Bronte cemetery, and then I’m at Tamarama (this tiny little wonder of a beach, a mere cove but with fierce white waves and some dazed looking lifesavers sprawled almost horizontal watching the four or five swimmers wrestle with the surf). I wonder at being a lifesaver – the 360-odd days of boredom with sand in your shorts must be made up for by those three or four moments of sheer terror and excitement when someone almost drowns and you are called to the rescue. Or maybe I have the stats wrong and it’s the other way around.

The locals call the beach Glamarama – is it one of those nasty Australian in-jokes, a cruel irony, a pinned on name to show what it clearly is not? Or does it refer to the trim torsos on the beach, to Sydney’s obsession with showy glam? There are no surfers at Glamarama today. I try and remember my 15-year-old surf-lifesaving training from the cruel coastal waters of Victoria, reading the churning lines of water frothing this way and that to detect a rip, but I fear my surf savvy has receded like the tide.

My thoughts whip around as unpredictably as the sea-spray: what does it mean to be a writer, why do we do it? Is this a noble pursuit or the most narcissistic profession imaginable? I fear that if I can’t find a reason in the middle of this all this churning, maybe like those ill-fated tourists who always chose to swim at the wrong end of Bondi, I’ll drown.

I am rehearsing a play of mine at STC, which will be read for the public at the end of the week. I started writing the play a year and a half ago: it’s set in the dead red centre of Australia, in a small dusty town. I wonder at this strange beast the play has become, separate to me and of me at the same time. I climb the track running up up up, zigzagging past the dog runners and the dilly-dallyers. My arms and legs ache like foreign limbs, as if they might fall off my body, as if pieces of myself were as angular and jagged as a Picasso. I started writing the play at a silent writer’s retreat in the Catskills with Erik Ehn: the bald and wondrous guru of playwriting. On the first day, gathered mute in a circle, all the writers looked at him wide-eyed as he described the original meaning of sin: to be out of step with oneself, out of place. Forget about guilt and reprobation. This was a definition of sin I could really get behind. Here I was in upstate New York, in a strange sticky summer with forested smells that weren’t recognizable to me (no eucalypt or jasmine or frangipani) and I thought: I am literally out of place. I don’t belong here. This is not my country And so I thought, Fuck it. I’m going to write an Australian play. And that’s the beginning of the story, and the story now is me in Sydney working on Underland. But there’s a lot between the beginning and the now, a lot I won’t bore you with. Or a lot I can’t explain: like Japanese businessmen crawling out of the earth from Tokyo, men who might be crocodiles, the nasty sharp edged love between schoolgirls, the terror of the Australian desert landscape for whities (that endless and infinite dry that runs hot by day and icy by night and can kill you just for getting in the middle of it). But for all of that you’ll just have to come see the reading yourself.

——

(somehow this meandered its way into a plug… here are the details below, fab cast and director and it’s free!)

Underland
By Alexandra Collier
Directed by Paige Rattray

Featuring Yure Covich, Anna Lise Phillips, Shari Sebbens, Amanda McGregor, Annie Byron and Shingo Usami

A small dusty town gets hit by love, loss and animals that attack…

Friday January 27th
@ 6:30pm
Free!

Sydney Theatre

Richard Wherrett Studio
22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay (opposite pier 6/7)

Book tix - STC box office (02) 9250 1777

"The future is called ‘perhaps’, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And..."

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:22:53 -0500

“The future is called ‘perhaps’, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

- Tennessee Williams

Middlefish

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:13:00 -0500

Chaz and I had hipster Thai in Carlton. It was spicy.

Willow’s One Night Stand

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:16:00 -0500

Ok – so I am back and blogging. Here are some photos from my recent musical written with composer/singer-songwriter Greta Gertler of The Universal Thump: Willow’s One Night Stand.

Featuring the inimitable Matt Steiner and Pearl Rhein, directed by Ben Vershbow and performed inthe Farrington Loft in Brooklyn for our newly launched Come Home with Me series.

So what’s the story?

Willow meets boy. Takes boy home. Then there’s a medley of tunes featuring rutabagas, breast obsessions, barking dogs, creatures in the night and more…

Tunes to come… we are doing a demo session soon!

Matt yearns

Approaching the Beast

Matt goes home with Willo

Fondling the Rutabaga

Willow & Matt get fresh

Willow wonders

Me & Georgia Clark, post-show