We have welcomed Gary as our seventh resident for the year, he is a playwright, director and writing teacher whose work is produced locally and internationally. His scripts have been published by Playmarket in NZ, and by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama in London. In November 2013 Gary received the Playmarket Award acknowledging his significant artistic contribution to New Zealand theatre.
His most well-travelled play is Skin Tight, written in 1994. In 2016 a French translation by Xavier Mailleux –Te tenir contre moi – was produced by Théâtre L’Instant in Montréal. His 1996 play Mo & Jess Kill Susie, was reinterpreted in 2017 as E Kore A Muri E Hokia by Ruia Taitea Creative with large sections translated into Te Reo Maori by Ani-Piki Tuari and her team.
Other work includes An Unseasonable Fall of Snow, Home Land, Peninsula, Lines of Fire – a site-specific work performed in the Dunedin Railway Station – and two radio plays The Moehau and News Bomb.
He also collaborated with percussionist Chris O’Connor, NZTrio and Auckland’s Massive Company in 2014 to create My Bed My Universe.
Gary’s most recent work was Shepherd which he directed at The Court Theatre in Christchurch, NZ, in 2015.
His current projects are the libretto for Star Navigator, a new opera conceived by NZ musician Tim Finn and co-commissioned by NZ Opera and West Australian Opera; a new play for The Court Theatre, The Breath of Silence; and an upcoming adaptation of David Galler’s book Things That Matter for the Auckland Theatre Company.
Gary also teaches theatre writing at Unitec in Auckland and the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington.
Gary’s residency project is a non-fiction book that looks at writing theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is intended primarily for teachers, mentors and nurturers of emerging playwrights, but also useful to the writers themselves and to anyone interested in a discussion of writing for theatre.