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Female Transport

Presented by Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at Campus Auditorium, Indiana University South Bend

October 10-October 19, 2008

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The IUSB Theatre Company at the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at IU South Bend will open their 2008-2009 performance season with Female Transport by Steve Gooch. Randy Colborn directs this play.

Female Transport is the tale of the transfer of six convicts from England to a penal colony in New South Wales. The play is set in 1807 on the prison hulk The Sydney Cove. The audience will witness some of the experiences women convicts might have encountered during the six month sea journey to Australia. What begins as a riotous group of disparate cellmates transforms during the voyage to a tough, unified matriarchal society—ready to change the wild land they are about to inhabit into a more just place than the England they left behind. Born in 1945, Steve Gooch wrote Female Transport in 1973. It premiered that year in London and has since been regularly performed at universities throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. Director Randy Colborn feels this play is important for student actors due to the limitations of opportunities these characters face. All of the characters are trapped in their circumstances and the play reveals how they make the most of their individual situations.

Director Randy Colborn has been a professor of Theatre at the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at IU South Bend for 17 years. Female Transport by Steve Gooch is the 30th production he has directed on campus. Since his appointment in 1991 he has also acted and/or directed in over 20 professional productions. Most recently he appeared in Macbeth with the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2008.