THE KIDS PLAY

Creating a show with teenagers about their lived experience in 2022, off the back of two years of intermittent covid lockdowns intruigued me. How was drama therapist, Anne, hearing teenagers secrets and then how were these confronting topics going to be handled in a public performance by the kids themselves? A piece of gritty and entertaining theatre created by a tight knit group of 30 young people aged 11 to 16 with the help of professional writers culminated in a three night run in November of 2022 to sold out audiences. Based in the inner north of Melbourne on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, this film captures a moment in time when a community came together under the "Cult of Anne" and the smell of an oily rag to make room for kids to be together and reflect their experiences of being a teenager in 2022. The results were more than the sum of their parts.