Below is the text of a two-minute pitch I presented at PANNZ Marketplace earlier this week.
I have an old VHS tape at home. It’s got a road trip my friend Stevo and I did of the South Island. Partway through the video there are a couple of minutes of some shaky-cam of the road, then panning to me behind the wheel studiously ignoring the camera, and all the while Stevo is singing along to Carole King’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.
I think that at that time in our trip we weren’t talking to each other.
I also think that at that moment I was looking for a quiet spot just off State Highway 6 where I was going to kill him and dump his body.
Those two minutes of video were the inspiration for Kingswood: how music is integral to that portion of our lives we spend going somewhere in a car; and how the past, love and forgiveness hold together our relationships.
Kingswood is a play about four thirtysomething friends who drive from Auckland to Wellington in a classic Holden station wagon — the same station wagon that was their ride at university, that took them to parties all over town, and carried them on long road trips around the country.
But it’s ten years after uni now.
And so, over two days and seven hundred kilometres, the audience will watch these four friends share unreliable reminiscences, sing along to Fur Patrol, Ardijah and the Exponents… and try to deal with decisions they made when they were twentysomething and thought that life was going to be a piece of piss.
Kingswood is about the people and things we hold on to in this life.
A revised first draft of the script is scheduled for delivery at the end of March for a workshop and rehearsed reading.
As the writer, I’m looking forward to a development season in the second half of 2014. The producer is witholding any comment until she sees the March draft.
Thank you for listening. I’m David Mamea, and I look forward to considering offers for Kingswood.
