American Song

By Joanna Murray-Smith  

If you could only find the moment that started everything.

4 October – 5 November (previews 3 – 6 October)

“I’m not a religious person — I don’t say that with any kind of pride, I’m just stating it — but even without God’s presence, it’s only human nature to wonder if for all of us there is a kind of moral reckoning?” 

American Song is an intimate new work by acclaimed Melbourne playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. A provocative and profound tour-de-force for one actor, played by Red Stitch ensemble member Joe Petruzzi, American Song is a play about parenting, love and the question: what could I have done differently?  

Commissioned and first produced in the United States last year to great acclaim, this will be the Australian premiere of a play that reaches beyond national or cultural borders.

Andy has much in common with many of us: the slow accumulation of a good life; love, work, friendship, children. But unforeseen events lead him to places he never imagined… Can we ever know the exact moment a good life turns irredeemably bad?

Directed by Tom Healey, this witty philosophical theatrical jewel reveals the terrifying ways our ordinary lives can become extraordinary.

“Murray-Smith peered inside the country’s human heart from her Australian perspective to produce an American Song, a perfectly tuned elegy to to a bygone America.” – Broadway World

“Many of the people who were initially laughing on Friday night were in tears by play’s end. And yes, I was among them… Murray-Smith speaks great truths in the disarmingly, deceptively simple language of everyday life. We need more plays like that.” – Milwaukee Sentinel

“Murray-Smith’s brilliant, black and biting humour supercharges the cut and thrust of the dialogue” – Sydney Morning Herald (on Switzerland).