Playwright Jackson Rosie promises to provide plenty of food for thought in his new play, it’s just that you might not know precisely what you’re being served.
The play, We Remember Wrong, will have its premiere at next month’s Dunedin Fringe Festival and promises a confronting and potentially disorientating experience.
On Rosie’s bleakly dystopian stage, two caged characters awake, stripped of all memory, their only pathway back to self-knowledge a masked man.
"They don’t remember anything and they’re being fed media — some of it’s true, some of it’s not," Rosie explains. "You can’t tell the difference. And then as we go on, it definitely does get pretty intense as the characters are put through their paces.
"We did our first table read a few weeks back and a lot of the cast and crew were crying over the phone as we were reading it."
We’re in an Aotearoa of the future, but perhaps the not too distant future, in which some of the dynamics of our own time have been dialled up to eleven.
Our two caged protagonists are Kiwa, a Māori man, and Sophie, a Pākehā woman, but they have become strangers to those identities.
For Rosie it’s close to the bone.
"I look at it as everything that I’ve done in the past has kind of been leading up to this. This is about as personal as it gets for me with this play and really just putting myself out there."
It’s only in very recent times that Rosie has discovered his whakapapa Māori, his Ngāi Tahu connections, so through Kiwa and Sophie the play speaks to his own experience.
"I wrote it throughout the process of getting to know my past and where I come from, which is what the play is about. It’s about these two characters whose memories have been erased."
Aotearoa’s history of colonisation provides the context — one given fresh currency by the Treaty Principles Bill, Rosie says.
The debate that swirled around the Bill was one of the main drivers behind the play.
Rosie had recently been learning more about Te Tiriti o Waitangi when the Bill was proposed, and recognised in it an attempt to undo the hard-won progress of recent decades. We need to remember how far we’ve come, he says, despite what the government and others might tell you.
It’s a bold entry into hotly contested territory, and indeed Rosie did have misgivings about the project.
While writing the show, he talked to a range of people about whether it was appropriate for him to take it on, given he still had much to learn about his own history. An element of imposter syndrome lingered.
"I spoke with one playwright and she said, ‘You know, that’s exactly why you should write this play, because this isn’t a play about pretending to know things. It’s a play about not knowing and finding that identity."
Just as Rosie has had to consider his place in Aotearoa, the play’s audience is also going to have to answer some questions of itself.
They are players in the narrative, witnesses to the experience of Kiwa and Sophie.
"And that in itself is a metaphor for people just watching. And that’s not to say that maybe they have much choice in the matter, but we do kind of just sit by."
The hallucinations, slop and fakery of AI are also explicitly referenced in the play’s interrogation of lying and deceit.
That again is consistent with the aim of Rosie’s production company JCR Production to do art that matters.
"That’s our goal. Our kaupapa is to do stuff that matters and that you can think about. Because we’re a group of people that believe that art should say something."
Rosie has broad experience of stage and screen, as an actor, director, producer and playwright, but this is JCR Productions’ first theatre show and the first time he has directed something he has I’ve written himself. It’s cool, he says.
"Scary, but cool."
The show
• We Remember Wrong runs March 13-March 15 at 7pm, as part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival. Shore Street Studios, 9 Shore St Andersons Bay.
