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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #199
This week on the ABR Podcast, we continue to celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the second of three episodes featuring the shortlist. This week’s story is ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse. The judges had this to say about ‘M.’: ‘Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.’ Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize. Listen to ‘M.’, published in the August issue of ABR.
Straddling broad comedy and genuine pathos, Uncle Vanya, first produced in 1899, is a very tricky play indeed. The main characters are mostly puffed up with delusion and fuelled by romantic fantasy. They use mordant self-deprecation alongside flights of fancy to express their dissatisfaction with their lot. The play encourages the audience to laugh at the evident gap between these characters’ vaulting sense of how special their lives ought to be relative to their actual lives of middling privilege, conducted in middling places.
... (read more)Cameron Lukey is an Australian producer whose credits include acclaimed productions of 33 Variations at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2019 (starring Ellen Burstyn) and Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017. He began his career as an opera singer and joined the team at fortyfivedownstairs in 2016. He was appointed Artistic Director of the theatre in 2023.
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