Comedy · 2016 · Published by Currency Press
Out of the Ordinary
All she wants is to be normal. Her family has other plans.
A hyperreal high-school comedy of normalcy versus the extraordinary — with fantasy sequences, musical numbers, cartoonish projections and a heroine desperate to escape her own wild family.
Out of the Ordinary follows Theodora Sprout — perpetually defensive, cynical and uptight — a twenty-something with one ambition above all others: to be normal, and to escape her gloriously wild family. There’s her former-singer father Jasper, her mother Barbara, her aspiring-politician boyfriend Wallace, and a self-help guru named Chad Mombardo who would very much like to sell her a better self. At the strange, beating heart of it all is Theo’s relationship with Anni — her twin, and her unborn daughter.
This is Vickery-Howe’s fourth play, and his most playful in form. It pushes everyday life into hyperreality: sudden fantasy sequences, musical numbers, cartoonish projections and exaggerated sound effects, with a visual language that nods to manga and anime. Beneath the colour sits a real question — drawn in part from John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? — about conformity and individuality, and our culture’s habit of turning the ordinary into spectacle.
It premiered at Adelaide’s Bakehouse Theatre with Accidental Productions, directed by Joh Hartog, and was published by Currency Press in 2016 with an introduction by Maggie Ivanova, “The Art of Life: Aesthetic Engagements with the Everyday.”
Press
“Alex Vickery-Howe has written a fun piece with serious messages about normalcy and difference.”
— Fran Edwards, Theatre Association
“Perfect comic timing… witty comebacks and zingers.”
— Jamie Wright, Glam Adelaide
“We are undoubtedly left to ponder the correlation between the characters and our own self-ego.”
— Georgina Tselekidis
