Truck Stop
Q Theatre and Seymour Centre 2012. Crowded Fire Theatre San Francisco 2015 Published in Australia by Currency Press 2012, published in The USA by University of California San Diego, 2013.
Winner Best Australian Play for Young audiences Australian Writer’s Guild Awards 2012.
Kelly We talk about sex.
You tell me about how out of control things got with Trent. The look on his face when you finally dumped him. How you wish you hadn’t lost your virginity to him cause he /came so quick.
Sam /Came so quick. And when I ask you about virginity you tell me that you /lost yours ages ago
Kelly /Lost mine ages ago.
Sam And I laugh at you and say bullshit!
Pause.
Do you want to talk about it?
Synopsis
Sam and Kelly live out west. They spend their lives waiting for texts, for boyfriends and those bitches in Year Ten to leave school so they can have somewhere decent to hang. But the longest wait is till the end of school, and waiting can be deadly.
Bored one recess and with double maths looming, the girls escape through the hole in the fence. Hang out at the truck stop on the highway at the picnic table with the flies. Read graffiti. Talk about sex, prostitutes, Lady Gaga.
When a truck pulls up. Their hearts race. The truckie’s kind of young. And hot.
Sam issues Kelly a dare…
Production history
Playwriting Australia National Play Festival 2011, Q Theatre and Seymour Centre 2012. Crowded Fire Theatre San Francisco 2015
Publisher details: http://www.currency.com.au/product_detail.aspx?productid=2530&ReturnUrl=/search.aspx?q=lachlan+philpott
‘This is a play I cannot recommend highly enough. Writing about it doesn’t really do it justice. This is a play you just need to see. Now.’ Jane Simmons
★★★★★Critic’s Choice
‘A gritty, playful and fast-moving story told from multiple perspectives and in many voices. [Philpott] puts the language of the schoolyard and that of marginalised people through the poetic and rhythmic sieves of a theatre writer but it still comes out sounding truthful and real. Sam, Kelly and Aisha emerge as distinctive personalities, not just different facets of a social problem. He has a tuned ear for the grown-ups, too: a stealthily interrogative school counselor; parents who have given up on their kids; Aisha’s protective and dismayed mother… Parents and educators may find Truck Stop confronting for its refusal to judge as much as for its subject matter. Adolescents who see it (and they should) might find it confronting, too, though in a different way. It’s not often they see themselves represented with this kind of clarity, honesty and respect.’
Jason Blake, Sydney Morning Herald
‘As a piece of playwriting it is daring, well-crafted, compelling and deeply effecting. This isn’t a piece of writing to prove a stylistic flourish – this is a remarkable piece of playwriting. Lachlan Philpott’s Truck Stop is not only a very entertaining and engaging play, but one of the most culturally important, artistically significant and socially relevant portraits of where we are, right here and now.’ Augusta Supple Theatre Blog