DIRECTOR
Presented by Before Shot
fortyfivedownstairs, August 2018
YOU HAVE TO BE SNEAKY TO FIND THE TRUTH. CHARLIE MANSON KNEW THIS.
HIS FAMILY KNEW THIS. THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU PROBABLY KNOWS THIS.
MAYBE YOU DO TOO.
COME DOWN TO SNEAKYVILLE.
IT'S A HELL OF A TRIP.
From award-winning playwright Christopher Bryant and Green Room nominated director Daniel Lammin, Sneakyville is a darkly funny and theatrically daring new work about where the worst of us come from, and why the rest of us fall in love with them.
Featuring
Kristina Benton, Julia Christensen, Wil King, Patrick Durnan Silva & Grace Travaglia
Production Design: Nathan Burmeister
Lighting Design: Alexander Berlage
Sound Design & Composer: Kellie-Anne Kimber
A/V Design: Justin Gardam
Production Manager: Kathryn Yates
Producer: Morgan Little
Stage Manager: Beth Paterson
Assistant Director: Jessica McLaughlin Cafferty
Publicity: Cameron Lukey
Photography: Sarah Walker
Directors Notes
Sneakyville is about Charles Manson.
It’s also not about Charles Manson.
If you’ve come expecting a biography, a series of pithy facts you can rattle off at a dinner party, executed with theatrical blood and violence and all the traditional trappings of the mad hippy cult leader who incited a group of young people to acts of extreme violence in the dying days of the Summer of Love, then you’re in for a bit of a surprise.
It’s also not about Charles Manson.
If you’ve come expecting a biography, a series of pithy facts you can rattle off at a dinner party, executed with theatrical blood and violence and all the traditional trappings of the mad hippy cult leader who incited a group of young people to acts of extreme violence in the dying days of the Summer of Love, then you’re in for a bit of a surprise.
Christopher Bryant is an insanely ambitious playwright. In the seven years I’ve been working with him, his ambition has only gotten greater, his provocations bolder, the biting anger in his voice sharper. He dissects our popular culture, how we turn that which we should empathise with or revile into vapid mass entertainment, sapped dry of humanity or understanding. Sneakyville is his ultimate expression of this - how we turned a man who committed an act of extreme violence for the sake of his own narcissism into a pop culture icon, exactly what he wanted, and the consequences of this - not just in 1960’s California, but for us now in our own country.
It’s a chronicle of one of the most bizarre phenomenons of the twentieth century and the ripples it continues to send through the twenty-first. It’s a series of conundrums and provocations, an entity aware of its audience and their expectations of it. Whenever you think you know where it’s going, Christopher spins the wheel and send you off somewhere unexpected, further down a rabbit hole where the racist and anarchic ravings of a psychopath start to make uncomfortable sense. It’s a work of incredible ambition, length and scale, vast in time and geography. As a team of theatre makers, we’ve pushed our resources and skills to their limits to realise its ambition as fully as possible. Sneakyville is a theatrical mountain, and the view from the top is awesome and horrifying.
Sneakyville is about Charles Manson.
It’s also not about Charles Manson.
It’s about all of us.
Poster image by Sarah Walker
Poster design by Daniel Lammin
Photo: Aleks Corke