Keith Gow, Writer

There are three basic ways to experience a Short & Sweet Festival:

1) As a wildcard, performed once (or twice) - with all your work focused on that one (or those two) performances to impress an audience
2) As a Top Thirty play - five performances spread over a week, a decent but short season to show off your ten minute play, put together in a handful of weeks by writer, director and actors that are basically thrown together randomly
3) As an Independent Theatre Company submission - where an independent theatre company presents the show as a group, able to handpick their director and have more discretion over casting, production, etc.

And as I've been involved in three Short & Sweet Festivals in Melbourne now, I've progressed through each of those experiences. They all have their pros and cons, but for me, developing this project with The Wooden Leg team has been the most fulfilling to this point thus far.

Wallis, Andy, Hayley and I got to decide which play we were goin…

Twelve months ago, I premiered a short play of mine at The Owl & the Pussycat in Richmond. Titled You Will Be Kissed By Princess Leia, the play was about how you can’t always live up to the dreams you had when you were fifteen years old. It’s definitely the most autobiographical of all my plays, dealing with one character at age 15 and at age 35, interrogating himself about where he’s been and where he’s going. It’s about finding your feet as a kid and finding your comfort zone as an adult.
There was some fun to be had in the fifteen-year-old not understanding references his thirty-five-year old self makes. And some drama in the conflict between how the character had been as a teenager and how he’d wished he’d been. And the show was done in the round in the Owl & the Pussycat’s then-gallery space, as if the crowd was surrounding two kids fighting in the schoolyard.
After the show, if we weren’t drinking at the Pussycat, we’d head next door to Holliava to talk about how that n…