Don's Party and the AV Jennings 'Type 15' Home
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Author(s)
Volz, Kristy
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2012
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Australian housing underwent a watershed when 1960s mass-produced houses slowly started subscribing to a new
aesthetic of continuous living spaces, known as the ‘open plan’ home. This created a new landscape for Australian
playwrights to observe and explore in their work when representing domesticity on the stage. Instead of representing a
single room of the house on the stage, plays such as ‘Don’s Party’, started to work with a number of openly connected
spaces bound by doorways to private sections of the house or to specific outdoor areas. In representing this dialectic
between interior and the exterior, private and public ...
View more >Australian housing underwent a watershed when 1960s mass-produced houses slowly started subscribing to a new aesthetic of continuous living spaces, known as the ‘open plan’ home. This created a new landscape for Australian playwrights to observe and explore in their work when representing domesticity on the stage. Instead of representing a single room of the house on the stage, plays such as ‘Don’s Party’, started to work with a number of openly connected spaces bound by doorways to private sections of the house or to specific outdoor areas. In representing this dialectic between interior and the exterior, private and public spaces in the home, the continuous spaces of the AV Jennings house in ‘Don’s Party’ acted to blur these conditions creating an outer interior. These connected spaces became the place for an outward performance on the family’s interiority, while simultaneously presenting a boundary to an inner interior in the offstage spaces of the home. This paper focuses on the play 'Don's Party' by David Williamson and how the spatial arrangements of the AV Jennings home, in which it was set, influenced the playwright. The research includes a textual analysis of the play, biographical research and interviews with the playwright alongside an analysis of the spatial arrangements of AV Jennings houses.
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View more >Australian housing underwent a watershed when 1960s mass-produced houses slowly started subscribing to a new aesthetic of continuous living spaces, known as the ‘open plan’ home. This created a new landscape for Australian playwrights to observe and explore in their work when representing domesticity on the stage. Instead of representing a single room of the house on the stage, plays such as ‘Don’s Party’, started to work with a number of openly connected spaces bound by doorways to private sections of the house or to specific outdoor areas. In representing this dialectic between interior and the exterior, private and public spaces in the home, the continuous spaces of the AV Jennings house in ‘Don’s Party’ acted to blur these conditions creating an outer interior. These connected spaces became the place for an outward performance on the family’s interiority, while simultaneously presenting a boundary to an inner interior in the offstage spaces of the home. This paper focuses on the play 'Don's Party' by David Williamson and how the spatial arrangements of the AV Jennings home, in which it was set, influenced the playwright. The research includes a textual analysis of the play, biographical research and interviews with the playwright alongside an analysis of the spatial arrangements of AV Jennings houses.
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Conference Title
Compass Points: The locations, landscapes and coordinates of identities in contemporary performance making. Proceedings of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama & Performance Studies (ADSA) 2012 Conference
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Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2012. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. For information about this conference please refer to the conference’s website or contact the author[s].
Subject
Architectural History and Theory