The Road Less Travelled

See article in its original context here by Kylie Northover for The Age.

When Jane Miller won the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award in 2011, it was more than just a boost for an up-and-coming playwright – the 44-year-old had barely written a thing since her teenage years.

An ”early mid-life crisis” and a six-week CAE course changed all that.

”I hadn’t written for 18 years,” says Miller, whose play, True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, opens at fortyfivedownstairs next week. ”I had written a couple of high-school productions and then I just stopped – I didn’t write another thing,” Miller says.

Writing was always in the back of her mind as ”a dream”, but she ”got caught up in the idea of getting a job that was safe and buying a house, that sort of stuff”.

Miller works as a librarian at the University of Melbourne and says a few years ago, she suddenly thought, ”Oh, I was supposed to write.”

She enrolled in a six-week course run by Peter Murray ”and it completely reintroduced me to this thing that I had loved. I thought I’d just see if I still loved it.”

She wrote a short play, Perfect Stillness, for the Short and Sweet competition – an annual event in which entrants write 10-minute plays, many of which go on to be produced as full-length works – and won the people’s choice award.

”I’m really fortunate as that was the first play I wrote,” Miller says of the 2007 work.

”It then went on to have international productions. I’m just amazed by it.”

She’s written several short plays since, which have also been performed at Short and Sweet and the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre’s MelBorn festivals. In 2012, she made her debut at La Mama with her first full-length work, Happily Ever After.

Miller says True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, which she has been developing for two years with funds from her R.E. Ross Trust award, is something of a dream come true.

”You don’t often get to work full-time for a week with a director and actors on developing a script, and that’s what I used my funding for; it makes such a difference,” she says.

Having real actors read her work, rather than just having her words all take place in her head, was ”incredible”.

”Although I’m not in any way musical, I always think when I hear actors read my work for the first time you can tell so much more about it than just seeing it on the page. It’s almost like listening to music out of tune: you can hear where it’s not working, but you can also hear where it’s flowing nicely, and if you’re lucky enough to have really good actors doing that, it really exposes how the play is working.”

The play is a poignant comedy-drama about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths to pursue their dreams. Set in a rural Victorian town, it centres on a pair of outsiders, Jake and Maggie. Maggie dreams of escaping to Graceland (the play’s title comes from a lesser-known Elvis Presley song), and the mythology of Presley’s home becomes an aspirational dream. When Jake falls in love with Maggie, their quest to escape the town implicates the locals.

”It’s this idea of escaping day-to-day life and Graceland becoming somehow symbolic of that, in an idealised way,” Miller says.

”Maggie has been raised by her mother to be an Elvis fan, which immediately puts her a little bit out of step with her peer group because she’s only in her early 20s and her greatest desire is to visit Graceland. So then a lot of the narrative becomes about change – her love interest, Jake, who is a little bit different and also slightly out of step with the rest of the town, is trying to make that possible for her.”

It is, she says, a ”universal story about the ruthless pursuit of happiness”, set on the canvas of a rural town.

”The play also looks at how the way we relate to people and treat them can have impacts that people don’t anticipate. They may say things in a jovial way but it’s how that scars people over time.”

Miller says she feels blessed with the success she’s achieved. ”I have to pinch myself that I get to work with all these fantastic people,” she says of director Beng Oh, designer Christina-Logan Bell and the play’s cast. But what might have been had she not had an 18-year writing hiatus?

”I do sometimes wonder: would it have been different?” she says. ”Is there a reason? Was I meant not to write until now? I’m not superstitious, but perhaps I was meant to wait.”

And, a bit like the Elvis song, travel a more bumpy road.