Fortune

Fortune
by Lally Katz

Directed by Lauren Miller
Music by Jack Ramsey

Featuring: Cynthia Darlow, Jake Green, James Knight, Gregory Salata, and Justine Salata

In the midst of global economic disaster, Cookie, a pregnant Romani fortune teller desperate for a mark, strikes gold when she checks into an anonymous New Jersey motel. A grieving mother, a pair of jobless stock brokers, and a landless cowboy gamble everything on Cookie’s intuition, in the hopes that Fortune favors the bold in the home of the brave.

From the Playwright:

My brother is a passionate economist and he kept trying to convince me that I should be writing about the GFC.  He showed me a picture that he’d found online of the day the Lehman Brothers collapsed. In the picture there were a whole lot of employees, each holding a box of their belongings from their desks.  And there was one young man holding an empty box. It had been his first day of work. That became the beginning of the story. But over the year that I was gathering material on it, I became obsessed with psychics- one in particular, in New York. On every street corner, there seems to be a shopfront psychic- A Duane Reade and a psychic. It seems to me like it’s mysticism meeting capitalism. I was obsessed with one psychic in particular. Partly I was obsessed with her because I wanted answers and easy fixes to stuff in my own life, and partly because I was obsessed with her as a character. It seemed like the finance guys in the play needed to meet her too.

About the Playwright:

LALLY KATZ (Playwright) is an Australian resident, though she was born in the US and works across both countries.  She has an original and in-demand voice and works in theatre, film and television. For the stage Lally has a one-woman show, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, at Belvoir and Malthouse Theatres this year.

In 2011 Lally had three world premiere plays programmed in Australia; A Golem Story at Malthouse Theatre, Neighbourhood Watch at Belvoir and Return to Earth at Melbourne Theatre Company. Starchaser, a new play for children, was commissioned by Arena Theatre and premiered in 2012. Neighbourhood Watch was nominated for four Sydney Theatre Awards in 2011, including Best New Australian Work, Best Mainstage Production, Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Mainstage Production (Robyn Nevin) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Mainstage Production (Kris McQuade). The play was also nominated for an AWGIE, a Helpmann Award and a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. A Golem Story won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Return to Earth was recently nominated for a NSW Premier’s Award.

Lally will be writing an episode of Fremantle Media’s Wonderland later this year.  Lally wrote an episode of Fremantle Media’s Wentworth, a re imagining of iconic Australian series Prisoner. Lally wrote an episode of the second series of Spirited, starring Claudia Karvan, for W Channel and Southern Star. She has also written television for The Elephant Princess, a children’s series by Jonathan M Shiff Productions.

Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart opened in New York in late 2010. The Apocalypse Bear played at the Melbourne Theatre Company as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2009. Lally adapted stories from the bible for The Mysteries: Genesis at Sydney Theatre Company.  When The Hunter Returns was commissioned and produced by The Gaiety School of Acting in Ireland and had a return season at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Her play Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd premiered at Malthouse Theatre (co-produced by Arena Theatre) and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for drama in 2009.

Lally’s adaptation of Frankenstein was directed by Ralph Myers at Sydney Theatre Company in 2008 and nominated for a Queensland Premier’s Award for Best Drama Script. In 2007 Lally co-wrote Criminology with Tom Wright, which was produced by Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre, and two short plays Waikiki Palace and Hip Hop Hooray formed a double bill premiering at Sydney Theatre Company that same year.

Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre has produced a series of Lally’s plays: The Black Swan of Trespass which played at Malthouse, Belvoir and the New York International Fringe Festival where it won the Producer’s Choice Award after winning several Green Room Awards in Melbourne; The Eisteddfod premiered in Melbourne at the Storeroom Theatre and transferred to Malthouse, Belvoir and PS 122 and Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theatre in New York City, this production won the 2004 Best Independent Production Green Room Award.

Lally participated in the attachment programme at the Studio at the National Theatre in London in 2009 and won a British Council Realise Your Dreams grant for 2010. Lally was a Churchill fellow in 2010 and was appointed a Writer In Residence at Melbourne University in 2011.  In 2012 Lally won InStyle Magazine’s Women Of Style Award in the arts category and in 2013 she was the inaugural recipient of an Australian Writers’ Foundation Playwriting Grant.