Dragonflies
About this ebook
The year is 2021 and climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe. Donald Trump has been re-elected US President for a second term. Brexit is in full effect and causing chaos all over Europe. In the wake of escalating wars in the Middle East, famine in West Africa, and relentless terrorist attacks by radical extremists, the UK—and many nations around the world—has enforced a ban on all immigration.
With the coastline around him and life as he knows it crumbling to dust, Leslie Chen is forced to abandon his home in England and move his family back to his birthplace, Singapore. Confronting a country that is a world apart from the one he knew as a child, he is now made to question the meaning of home. As the crises and conflicts escalate, one thing is certain, come hell or high water, and possibly both, he must protect his family.
While dragonflies migrate halfway across the world, we, the human race, struggle to embrace our nomadic heritage, our need to move to greener pastures in order to survive. And as global warming, the resurgence of far-right politics and worldwide paranoia make us burn bridges and build walls between communities, families and individuals, we have to ask ourselves: Where do we go from here?
Reader Reviews:
“Compassionate, hopeful and exquisitely acted.”
–Best of 2017, The Straits Times
“Watching Dragonflies is like reading an issue of The Economist from cover to cover: it is chock-full of urgent issues from immigration to xenophobia to climate change. Excellent script, evocative staging, brilliantly played!”
–The Business Times
“A dynamic and fresh look on current affairs that aims to enrich, surprise and stimulate its audience. But overall, the message of Dragonflies is simple: build bridges, not walls.”
–Pride Kindness
“The play’s success lies in how realistic and possible it all is, and the genuine threats feel like they have the potential to seep into our own reality, with very real stakes for characters we’ve come to know and relate to, and evoking intense sympathy as we watch a family completely come apart, helpless in the face of circumstance.”
–Bakchormeeboy
“A gripping tale of displacement that is, at once, epic and intimate.”
–Naeem Kapadia, Crystalwords
“A play that ambitiously tackles multiple issues—from climate change to human migration, from racism and xenophobia to openness and generosity, from ambivalence to empathy, from impassioned implementation of laws and policies (when “I’m sorry” really doesn’t mean “I’m sorry”) to the touching gentle connection of human relationships across lines that traditionally do not cross—and somehow successfully stitches it all together into deep, stirring storytelling.”
–Sticky Rice
“Street's writing is effectual in capturing the pain brewed by grief, as well as the resignation in a person from a marginalised community.”
–Buro247
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About the author
Stephanie Street is an actor, writer and director born and raised in Singapore. She read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge before training to be an actor on the Nick Hytner scholarship at LAMDA. Her eighteen-year career as an actor has spanned the UK’s major theatres and TV channels. Theatre credits include James Graham’s Quiz in the West End, and Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nightwatchman for the National Theatre, the latter earning her a Whatsonstage nomination for Best Solo Performance.
Stephanie is currently the Resident Playwright at Pangdemonium Theatre Company and a columnist for The Stage, the world’s oldest theatre publication. She is on the Board of Chichester Festival Theatre and cofounded and chairs The Act for Change Project, a campaign for representative diversity in the UK performing arts. Her other plays (produced in the UK) include Sisters (Sheffield Crucible), Wuthering Heights (Ambassadors Theatre) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Finborough, Yard Theatre and Summerhall; nominated for the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award).
