ZEBRA!

Heard the one about the Australian and the American who walk into an Irish bar? It’s not the set-up you’re probably used to: the Sydney Theatre Company’s latest Main Stage offering ZEBRA! promises audiences a gritty rumination on who we are as Australians in a post-GFC world, not a punch line.

ZEBRA! takes us back to 2009, to an empty New York bar. Outside, the once-buoyant city is grappling with winter and the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis; beyond, the world is busy trying to face down the greatest economic crisis in decades.

Businessman Jimmy (Bryan Brown) is here to negotiate an altogether different sort of deal, however: he’s on a blind date with his future father-in-law, Larry (Colin Friels), and he’s putting the hard sell on himself. Caught up in this flurry of testosterone is Robinson (Nadine Garner), the bar’s owner, who’s dealing with a crisis or two of her own.

“It’s a very domestic story at the heart of it and one that I think people will identify with,” director Lee Lewis says. “But I think what we also identify with is that question about – what the hell do we think about America right now, and where do we go from here.”

Lewis, who spent a decade living and working in New York, says the play is necessarily an outsider’s view of the United States: partly because it comes from Australian playwright Ross Mueller and is performed by iconic Australian actors, but also because post-crisis Australia has found itself in an altogether more comfortable place than has America.

“We didn’t know we were back then. I made plans with my husband, we’ve got a little bit of family land up in the mountains and I was like well if it all goes to shit and there’s no money in theatre and there’s no money in photography, we’re just going to go up and build a little place and have chickens,” she said. “And then about six months after that, we’re in the middle of something and we’re working like crazy and he said to me – weren’t we supposed to be with the chickens?”

Mar 10-Apr 30 (previews from Mar 5), Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $30-77, 9250 1778, sydneytheatre.com.au