Dancing With Strangers theatre company’s upcoming production ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS tackles some confronting a very complex, and very important issues. ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS brings together a group of emerging Australian playwrights with some of their more established peers, to present a new body of work.

While being inspired by the educative telling of Sylvia Plath’s life by Corbett, Johns and Palmer, Dancing With Strangers was working with a number of young writers who were developing works that cast light on issues relating to suicide. These young writers had each come to confront this issue in their own time and on their own terms, and with their own quite personal characters, all of which in some way echo or reflect the experience of our renowned Sylvia.

ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS brings together four individual and personal stories, which probe issues of marginalisation, depression, injustice and suicide. Both in the broader population, and certainly among younger generations, these issues are among the most difficult and least understood problems facing our society. By making public the usually private and unspoken world of people who choose death, ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS hopes to build a better understanding of what suicide means and represents. ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS has been supported by DepressionNet and other depression and suicide awareness groups.