Oz you like it

IMMIGRATION POLICY Stevenson, left, and Waters build a new troupe.

Photograph: Zac Chandler

Between sips of hot chocolate, Nick Stevenson and Jeremy Waters dissect the way violence shapes souls, psyches and cities. Their Australian accents—long, flattened vowels pressed into sinewy drawls—rise effortlessly above the clink of spoons and the dim roar of passing traffic. This is a conversation that Stevenson, 28, and Waters, 30, have been having since meeting in 2003 as actors in the New York production of the desperate-housemates Aussie cult classic, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. Each knew what he liked: theater that didn’t flinch at dark topics. The best stories were “in-your-face, provocative, chilling and enlightening,” as Stevenson puts it. A light will certainly be shone into some of Oz’s dimmer corners when the pair’s new company, Outhouse Theater, premieres one of Australia’s most controversial tales, The Boys.

Gordon Graham’s drama relates a grim tale of violence that ends with the rape and murder of a young woman. Based loosely on the real-life killing of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby in 1986, it was made into a 1998 film starring Toni Collette and David Wenham. The material is an actor’s dream, the Outhouse boys say, and it’s not hard to see why: three juicy central roles and a shocking story line. The trick, however, will be in bringing delicacy and shade to the big brushstrokes. Critical praise for the bold, loud Australian aesthetic is regularly tempered with criticism about a concomitant lack of subtlety. Witness the critical reaction to the Sydney Theater Company’s Hedda Gabler this year at BAM, which was damned with faint praise for its overly vigorous interpretation and for lead Cate Blanchett’s mean-girl bullying and slapstick pratfalls.

Australian native Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of P.S. 122, says the country’s stage culture does export a robust physicality, a lack of obsession with words and risk-taking that comes with the absence of a dominant commercial sector. But what makes Australian theater strong can also be its Achilles’ heel. As Gantner points out, the lack of a for-profit scene can result in uneven professional standards. Neither Sydney nor Melbourne has an equivalent to Broadway, so the professional scene is marked by a handful of state and niche companies.

And while the nation’s 29 biggest performance groups shared about US$78.5 million of government funding in 2005, fringe and experimental companies struggle for resources. Waters knows it’ll be an even tougher ride in his adopted country, but he remains optimistic. “[Perhaps] theater in Australia doesn’t carry the cultural weight it does in the States and Britain,” he admits. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: We aren’t weighed down by centuries of traditions, techniques and conventions.”

is playing at the Kraine Theater through Sept 23.