Inspired by true, personal histories
told by Caitlin Hicks
Also featuring new book ‘Tweets from the Trenches’
By Jacqueline Carmichael
Saturday, November 10th
7:30 – 9:00 PM
Tickets $15 – $20 at the door
Playwright, performer and author Caitlin Hicks is curating and will perform in a show called Next of Kin on Saturday, November 10th from 7:30 – 9:00 PM at The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre. The evening will feature true stories from World War I and World War II.
Sunshine Coast actors bring stories to life
Local writers, artists, and actors perform in the show, (Pat Dorval, Steve Schwabl, Calvin Craigan, and Mike Oswald read. Gordon Halloran sings songs of the era.
Highlights of New Book on World War I
NEXT OF KIN will bring to life the work of journalist Jacqueline Carmichael who has written a new book called Tweets from the Trenches, Little True Stories of Life and Death on The Western Front. The book is a post-modern collage of poetry, historical documents, tweets and photographs from her grandfather, a veteran of the Western Front.
The show opens with Hicks’ dramatic monologue UNDER THE PORCH. It is told in the voice of a young woman on the morning of her marriage to her second husband. The dramatic monologue is a personal, final goodbye to her first husband who was killed in World War II.
World War II: The Sunshine Coast
In Act II, which covers World War II, Hicks will tell first person accounts from a show she wrote called THE LIFE WE LIVED, The War Years. The show is a compilation of stories Hicks gathered from Sunshine Coast locals, who experienced the war from various points of view. Tony Onno, a Japanese tree faller in Toba Inlet was told ‘to get the hell out’ in February 1942. Leon Arthur participated in developing the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rona Le Duc worked at Essondale while her fiance was a gunner on airplanes.
The final story, NEXT OF KIN, is Hicks’ true story of visiting the grave in France of the young soldier who married her mother. Carl Robert Swanson was killed during the twenty-one day assault by American and French forces on the Colmar Pocket of the German 19th army. During this battle, the enemy was ‘elminated as an effective force’.
Doors open at 7 o’clock on Saturday, November 10th. Tickets are $20 at the door.
Odyssey to Dugouts
Published in the centenary of the last 100 days of the “Great War,” Tweets from the Trenches is written in flash documentary creative non-fiction. It encompasses excerpts of journals, letters and memoirs of Allied participants from Prince Edward Island to Yorkshire to South Carolina. The war unfolds chronologically in stories of valour and heartbreak, on everything from rationed rum and brave homing pigeons to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Doors open at 7 o’clock on Saturday, November 10th. Tickets are $15 & $20 at the door.
