As a teenager, Mary Rachel Brown participated in Canberra Youth Theatre.
Now, almost four decades later, the award-winning playwright has had a play commissioned and co-produced by the company.
"I wish I could have told my 16-year-old self this would happen," Brown said.
Rosieville was commissioned during the pandemic and is now on at the Courtyard Studio in a premiere production directed by CYT's artistic director, Luke Rogers.
The play was runner-up in the Theatre for Young Audience category in the Shane & Cathryn Brennan Prize for Playwriting Collection.
Inspired in part by Brown's experience growing up in Belconnen, the intergenerational Rosieville is set in a cul-de-dac in that suburb.
Brown said the play's themes included how people develop ways to manage their expectations and how to cope when they don't get what they want.
At the start, one of the homing pigeons belonging to Alan (played by Richard Manning) went off on a race and didn't come back.
Everyone on the street is keeping an eye out for its return.
The "heart of the play" is tween Rose (Imogen Bigsby-Chamberlin) whose father has left the family.
Rosie, Brown said, was on the cusp of becoming a teenager when the imaginary worlds created in childhood tended to dissipate or be discouraged.
But Rosie is still heavily involved in hers as a way to cope with what's happening.
"She's hiding it more."
Emerging from her subconscious while she dreams is her own homing pigeon (Claire Imlach) with no sense of direction or spatial awareness, but making up for it in intelligence.
"Rosie is up against her first experience of heartbreak," Brown said.
The pigeon - sometimes tough, but meaning well - provides a way to help her deal with the situation.
Other members of her family have their own coping mechanisms.
Liz (Amy Crawford), Rosie's mother, keeps having her hairstyle changed by hairdresser Cindy (also played by Imlach).
And Rosie's older brother Xavier (Oscar Abraham) immerses himself in making a flying contraption for the Birdman Rally. The rally was an event that took place in Canberra from 1985 to 1992 in which brave or possibly foolhardy folk would launch themselves in homemade aircraft from a 10-metre high platform above Lake Burley Griffin. To collect a cash prize, fliers had to be able to glide at least 50 metres before hitting the water. Brown, 53, remembers the rally and has resurrected it for her story, which is set in the present.
The playwright, who now lives in Sydney, has won the 2016 Lysicrates Prize, the 2008 Rodney Seaborn Award, the 2007 Max Affords Award and the 2006 Griffin Award.
Rosieville is on at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre from Wednesday, October 4 to Saturday, October 8, 2023 at various times. Suitable for ages 10+. See: canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
