8-18 July 1986, Free Theatre, The Arts Centre
Red Cross by Sam Shepard
Directed by Leonard Wilcox

The lights come up full and the audience is momentarily snow blinded by the antiseptic whiteness of the stage set. With its spartan twin beds this could be a hospital, a private sanatorium for the diseased; it is in fact a vacation retreat, a series of rustic chalets in mountain wilderness; a playground for those with more than physical illness.

RED CROSS is one of Sam Shepard's early one act plays, first performed in New York in 1968. It is full of verbal games, bizarre visual and word puns and the uneasy juxtaposition of the mundane and the monstrous. The mountain cabin in which the play is set becomes an arena of competing fantasies as each of the three characters spins out every more preposterous and mocking imaginings.
Takeaway by Cynthia Brophy
​Directed by Peter Falkenberg

On a bleak winter night in Christchurch a handful of people gather in a Thai takeaway and try to drink enough to shut out the cold and the fact that they're 6,000 miles from the nearest Mr. Doughnut and the numbing comfort of U.S. consumer culture.

TAKEAWAY, by Cynthia Brophy, is a one act satire about cultural interface, ketchup, tweed caps, milk bars, Muddy Waters, gin and water, Diet Coke and toasters. Takeaway is supported by American Blues music which triggers oedipal fantasies for the characters.

Reviews

... a night of hugely entertaining, skilful and ambitious theatre.... for $8.00, surely makes for the best night out at the theatre available in Christchurch

Red Cross / Takeaway
Blair French, CANTA
... a feeling of aimlessness becoming stronger as the play meanders towards its end.

​Talk as a weapon in absorbing sequence
Paul Bushnell, The Star
... the script needs some major upholstering to integrate an unconvincing feminist theme and sharpen the cultural commentary

Free Theatre bill
John Farnsworth, The Press