The Excerpts: The Playreadings
Wed 25 Nov - Playreadings: Confession and Live at Six (The Excerpts)
Thu 26 Nov - Playreadings: Ana & Bub and Waterview (The Excerpts)
Fri 27 Nov - Playreadings: The Misery of Milk and Meat and 100k (The Excerpts)
Sat 28 Nov - Playreadings: I’ve Been Trying To Write a Manifesto and Emerging Writers
Table Alumni (The Excerpts)
Confession
by Riley Brebner
It’s Easter Camp — easily the best and most chaotic weekend of the school year. Confession follows five students as they navigate camp life, each carrying their own worries, secrets, and questions. On the surface, everything revolves around the upcoming talent show. Everyone wants to nail their performance, impress their friends, and survive the social hierarchy of camp.
But beneath the rehearsals, group games, and late-night chats, something else is going on. As the weekend unfolds, bigger questions begin to creep in. Sexuality, gender, body image, friendship, and the pressure to fit in all start bubbling to the surface as adolescence hits in full force.
Each of the students is dealing with something different, but they’re all starting to realise the same thing: they aren’t kids anymore. The things they feel, the people they’re drawn to, and the expectations placed on them suddenly feel bigger, louder, and harder to ignore.
Funny, awkward, and heartfelt, Confession explores the messy moment between childhood and adulthood — when everything feels intense, confusing, and deeply important.
The Misery of Milk and Meat
by Sugar Rea-Bruce
In the middle of nowhere, far from prying eyes, a young woman grieves the death of her partner on a dairy farm. Alone. Except for the cows. In her grief she becomes fixated on the idea of becoming a mother, the dream of a baby that can never be half of herself and the person she loves.
The Misery of Milk and Meat is a dialogue between a young woman and a cow.
I've Been Trying to Write a Manifesto
by Peter Burman
I've Been Trying to Write a Manifesto is a new play inspired by Cate Blanchett’s Manifesto (2015), reimagined through a contemporary queer lens.
The piece brings together 12-13 queer performers, each delivering a distinct manifesto, story, or declaration that articulates their relationship to queerness within a world structured by heterosexual norms.
The title itself is intentional. The word manifesto is historically charged. Often associated with power, ideology, and authority. And its use here is a deliberate reclamation, placing that language of certainty and dominance into queer mouths that have historically been denied it.
The work won’t offer a singular definition of queerness, in fact the piece embraces multiplicity, contradiction, and collision. Each manifesto exists in tension with the others. Together they form a polyphonic portrait of queer life that resists coherence, resolution, and assimilation.
Live at Six
by Holly Hudson
In 1989, an independent television network launches in Aotearoa, crushing the monopoly of traditional broadcasting. Ambitious journalists competed to be a part of the new network, sensing an opportunity to redefine New Zealand media. But when up and coming journalist Joanna Paul is named the new face of it, both the newsroom and the audience are shocked. She’s young, Māori and female, and is soon forced to reckon with intense public scrutiny, pushback from colleagues and the unexpected price of fame and fortune.
Based on interviews with journalist Joanna Paul-Robie, Live at Six follows Joanna’s race to break the biggest story of her career before her rivals – and her fight to define herself before others do it for her.
Waterview
by Tash Lay
The year is 2017. Donald J. Trump is president of the United States, the people have been raring to vote National out, Lorde's in the charts, and it's the end of an era for the Waterview flat, a group of high school friends who are all moving out after five years of living together.
When one of them reveals that they're moving out because they're having a baby with their partner, the whole friend group falls head-first into a frenzied panic about what this means for their friendship, and how to contend with their own impending adulthood. Weaving back and forth in time across five years' worth of house parties, Waterview is a play about crashing out because your best mate's going to be a dad at 23, bumming ciggies off of your friend's hot older brother, accidentally double-dropping the first time you try acid, and the different ways we cope in the face of an uncertain future.
Ana & Bub
by Rainton Oneroa
Two lifelong friends meet for a drink. They laugh, reminisce, and try to reconnect, but beneath the easy conversation lie truths that neither of them has been willing to face. As secrets surface, the foundations of their friendship begin to crumble.
100k
by Georgie Wright
It’s the eve of moving out day and girls are almost ready. Ruth’s dragging hair from the shower drain, Sammy’s hugging the neighbour’s cat and Flora’s trying to convince everyone that a bag of coke is a great idea. After three years co-existing in a house built for a short Victorian family, the air’s as thick with nostalgia as it is with black mould. The four will miss each other so much. They’re planning a group trip to Thailand. This is true love in a damp Grey Lynn flat.
But when Alice finds a scratchie under the fridge and wins 100k, the undercurrent of friction starts to ripple. Over the next few hours, the friends come undone as they try and fail to get answers. Whose is it? Who’s earned it? Who deserves it? Buried resentments are exhumed, history is weaponised and any possibility of an amicable departure goes out the door with the bond. At least they’ll save money on plane tickets.
But will they get what they’re owed?
100k is a dark comedy about friendship and flatting, money and desire. It’s about what’s bottled up for the sake of keeping the peace, and what happens when it comes up for air.
