Fear or Love
You Choose
Then take a step…

Precipice is a play about two characters balanced right on the edge, hovering, held in the moment before inevitable change. It’s about recent times — the tensions between anxiety, threat and compassion. About a society where some desperately want to raise the barricades, while others weep as they feel humanity slipping away.

It’s about the bridges between us. About how powerful and how fragile they are. The Tasman, the Westgate, the one over your favourite creek bed in a childhood memory. How deeply these engineering marvels, these sites of suspension, imagination and tension are stamped in the Australian psyche. And it’s about how potent, but often how seemingly insignificant and mundane, the chasms that divide us can be. And the awakening of the discovery that we may not just be simply divided after all.

Mel is a 40-year-old single working mother, struggling but strong, trying to maintain family, job and herself in a harsh world. A potent childhood incident has left her suffering from chronic vertigo, which she is only able to relieve by running. Al is older, a compulsive reader of death notices, and an obsessive attendee of the funerals of strangers. Through interior monologues and far-reaching conversations they reveal their pasts, presents, inner worlds and differing levels of consciousness as their lives converge.

Writer AWGIE Award winning playwright Catherine Ryan  Director Green Room Award winner Laurence Strangio  Producer Castlemaine State Festival  Set & lighting design Uli Radchevich & Jens Milbret  Sound design Jacques Soddell  Cast Bev Geldard, Tammy McCarthy, Tiffany Raae & Ian Scott

Winner of the 2009 George Fairfax National Playwrights Award

Developed in the Melbourne Theatre Company Hardlines
Affiliate Writers Program

Joint Winner of the 2009 Inscription Regional Script Award

I found Catherine Ryan’s play PRECIPICE to be well-written and provocative, and I am highly supportive of its being produced.
Edward Albee, Legendary Playwright, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?