Lucy Kowalski (Susanna Qian) is in the thick of a mid-30s crisis – she’s depressed, having just broken up with her boyfriend and quit her job. Arriving unannounced at her rural family home at midnight, her adoptive parents George (Syd Brisbane) and Shirley (Maude Davey) quickly realise their daughter is not OK. It becomes bizarre when she forms a fierce attachment to a cardboard box with nothing but a scribble on the inside that she swears used to be full of her favourite things, but her parents insist they’ve never seen before. This homecoming is the catalyst for an unraveling, as Lucy questions all she’s ever known, or thought she knew.
Directed by Bridget Balodis, K-BOX is the mainstage debut by Melbourne playwright Ra Chapman who, like her protagonist, was adopted from Korea as a toddler by white Australians. The play explores the fraught politics of transracial adoption and the crisis of identity experienced by those who feel “not quite”: not quite Australian, not quite Asian, floating in that nebulous space between.
