FREDERICK ZENNOR
Actor | Director | Playwright | Producer
PRODUCTIONS
ASYLUM
Adapted from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey
First Performed
November 24, 2014
"Is fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?"
Inspired by 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', Asylum looks at the prejudices and assumptions made surrounding mental health that began in mental institutions during the 1960s and are still engrained in our society today.
GODS AND MONSTERS
First Performed
September 21, 2015
"I try to close my eyes and think of happier things...
happy things... something."
Diana lives trapped inside a picture perfect dollhouse. Her ever-smiling mother hosts her father and his mistress, her brother manages existence with anti-depressants and weed, while her sister has been missing for two weeks and nobody has batted an eyelid.
Determined to find her sister, Diana is dragged
into the night and into a world of monsters.
Gods and Monsters is a hyper-surrealist nightmare that tackles domestic abuse, drug addiction, and the horrors of conformity. Set between the sickeningly plastic world of the dollhouse and the uncontrollable adolescent hedonism of the forest, this production tracks an extreme rite of passage that can only end in tragedy.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
Adapted from 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides
First Performance
November 5, 2015
"Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Fumes. Gas. Pills. Rope. Wrists.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
Cecilia Lisbon tried to kill herself. The second time she succeeded.
In the aftermath of her death her family continue to live but the teenagers living alongside the four remaining Lisbon sisters attempt to make sense out of the thirteen year old's senseless suicide.
One year after Cecilia's death, all of the Lisbon daughters
will have taken their own lives. But why?
This adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' infamous novel cuts deep into small-town suburban life, examining the ennui, cynicism and loss of innocence that defined adolescence in the United States during the years leading up to the turn of the century.
WONDERLAND
Adapted from 'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll
First Performance
November 27, 2015
"I hit the silver pool face first and fell
through the looking glass into my reality."
After a chance encounter with a white rabbit on a night out, Alice is given a free sample of 'Drink Me', a new drug circulating through the underworld. As Alice chases down the rabbit she finds herself in Wonderland, a new club anticipating a busy opening night. Unable to escape and surrounded by vice and sin, Alice deteriorates, losing herself within excess she has never experienced before.
This adaptation of Lewis Carroll's nonsense novel brings focus to issues surrounding substance abuse and addiction.
Wonderland places rave culture under a microscope and interrogates how easily young people can be drawn into a world of drugs.
PASSING SHADOWS
“Life. Death. Life, again.”
Los Angeles: City of Angels, Garden of Evil, the Edge of Paradise.
By the highway, next to the motel, lies a sole lamp post standing on the street corner. Beneath its beacon are three women, renting their bodies to whoever passes as they share the corner and their individual stories of abuse, conformity and repression
in order to achieve their American Dream.
Following three prostitutes in Bel Air, Passing Shadows is an extreme exploration of 21st century sexism and the continual objectification of women in our consumer society. Entwining a feminist narrative with comedy and horror, this production aims to distinguish
the painful differences between sex and love in a world
that has given up on light.
THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND
"I don't want to kill the ice cream man."
Between the estate and suburbia lies the playground. Within this crumbling landscape, sex and love are confused; lust is abundant; but the youth inhabit the playground to avoid the world. Reality blurs into the surreal; words battle to maintain meaning.
This is where the devil plays. This is where everything comes to die.
The Devil's Playground is a bildungsroman detailing a broken generation of adolescents exposed to sex, drugs and murder
at too early an age. Located within an eerie, desolate policed state,
this piece explores the betrayal, addiction and indifference
that affects young people in the 21st century.
NINA
"I lay in the street with her broken body."
Welcome to Nina's life, an assortment of objects littered with relevance to a string of events that have left her in pieces. Isolated within a putrescent waiting room, Nina recreates her life while drowning out the love she lost too soon.
Nina is a one woman show about motherhood and immobilization. Action and inaction haze together alongside drama and storytelling in this intimate and harrowing tale of devotion and deceit.
"Suburbia never killed anyone."
Three houses side by side on a picturesque suburban street, each containing a family with their own secrets. Trapped within the white picket fences, the nuclear inhabitants of small-town suburbia
soon find themselves exposing their tales of
violence, neglect and obsession.
Spanning 18 years, Terrence Loves You is a work of epic theatre following three mothers as they battle to keep their families safe and escape the monstrosities clawing at their doors. Terrence Loves You is about the birth of a psychopath, the conflict between nature and nurture, and the perversion of love in the modern world.
TERRENCE LOVES YOU
SOLITARY
“I’ll come here. I’ll know it.
I’ll come here and I’ll know it and I’ll be alive. Yes. I’ll still be alive.”
Isolation, eating away at each and every one of us; the lonesome gravedigger with their scanty plots; the gloomy scarecrow with their cheap narcotics; the sleepwalker, deaf to the world; Fingerthroat’s constant union; and the ever patient Patient.
Solitary is a collection of six short plays each exploring identity through a different kind of horror: human experimentation, a confrontation with Death, grave-robbing, substance abuse, STIs and the end of the world. These narratives are woven together to paint a bleak, unflinching picture of the modern world that depicts the suffocation of individualism within cultural hegemony.
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APOCALYPSE
"I hope the motherfucker burnt."
Stranded miles underground, a group of survivors wander amongst subterranean wreckage trying to piece together the ruins of their lives, striving to return to a world where meaning once made sense.
Set in the aftermath of a devastating explosion, Apocalypse investigates our response when we are directly confronted with an act of terror. In depicting human perseverance in the face of adversity, Apocalypse offers hope in the face of destruction and the possibility for a brighter world to be shaped by individual action.
CHIMERA
“Mercy died a long time ago.”
chimera
noun
a fire breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.
a thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to
achieve.
Chimera is a piece of surrealist theatre that examines the treatment of refugees following a nuclear fallout, critiquing the
political exploitation of vulnerable bodies
in order to better the lives of the 1%.
ROSES
"The entire country was founded on blood, honey.
There's no escaping that."
Los Angeles: City of Angels, Garden of Evil, the Edge of Paradise.
The Palace sits in the Californian Hills, a place where lust and transgressions find their home. Yet finances are tight
and the brothel is soon threatened with closure,
an act that its owner will do anything to prevent from happening.
Set within an alluring recreation of a David Hockney painting, Roses is about the nature of fame, happiness and capitalism within California. In painting its picture of sex workers beyond sex, the abuse they face and the cost of freedom, Roses aims to open its viewer’s eyes to a new kind of passion and a new kind of suffering.
NIGHT TERRORS
“Let me in.”
Nightmares, forming our identities, shaping our paths, guided by the hand of horror itself: a missing child, the minutes before suicide, the loss of a lover, being alone in the world. He preys on all of us. He drifts in between our dreams and our reality for sport.
Night Terrors is a surrealist collection of real and imagined conversations taking place between reality and the world of dreams, a distorted vision of a family as they become entrapped within a new-age cult focused on the second coming of Jesus Christ.
ΠΥΡ ΥΔΡΩΤΟΣ
VULCURNICA
"The fire seems ceaseless; it burns into the night and the stars."
Two lovers rest upon a hillside, staring out into the Mediterranean beneath the mountain’s shadow. As they share their true love with one another, they edge towards cataclysmic collapse.
Vulcurnica is a reflection on gender and sexuality, exploring the inequalities and cruelties of sexual oppression and the exploitation of relationships defined by power and ownership.
ACQUA BAEDEKER
"All I ever wanted to be was complete."
A midnight break-in to a public swimming pool finds Kobalos constructing an imagined landscape as he stares into the water and sees a vision of loneliness in the land of the dead.
Acqua Baedeker is a meditative study on mortality and identity as an outsider using Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Futurist and Dadaist forms of poetic verse with surrealist theatre to shape a stream of consciousness leading to the biggest decision of Kobalos’ life.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Written by William Shakespeare / Adapted by Frederick Zennor
First Performed
June 9, 2018
"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength,
but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant."
Los Angeles: City of Angels, Garden of Evil, the Edge of Paradise. Vienna Studios is mid-production on their new film, however
chaos reigns off-set and the director steps down; handing the
helm to his puritanical assistant director. With the lead actor
soon to be executed for his sins, it is up to his sister to save
him from the chopping block.
This production of Measure for Measure is a modern day take on Shakespeare’s infamous problem play focusing on issues of sexual assault, consent, and harassment within 21st century Hollywood.
MEAT
“As long as we are hungry we shall eat.”
Trapped within a concrete jungle, Mickey and Zoe Markham recover from their encounter with the new-age cult that kidnapped their son. Out of work and slowly starving the family get by on food coupons doled out by the government until Mickey finally lands a job at a slaughterhouse, a place where murder is rewarded and demons are let out to play.
Meat is an exploration of the food industry and its effect on its workers. Set within a slaughterhouse, the play interrogates the psychological results of killing animals, the dangerous spaces in which toxic masculinity is able to thrive as well as the projected global horror of overpopulation, dwindling resources
and income inequality.
DESCENSUS
“Your love is selfish.”
Zachary Klein had a sudden, violent heart attack on his way home from the gym. Supervised by EMTs and rushed to the hospital, he died on the operating table. Grieving in the hospital waiting room, Samuel Northwood is offered the chance to descend into hell and recover his lost love from eternal torment. However the chaos of the pit takes its toll as Sam becomes enthralled by the souls trapped and tormented there. As time runs out, Sam fights to find Zach before his soul is lost forever.
Descensus is an exploration of LGBTQ+ trauma, a contemporary reworking of Dante’s Inferno that examines the political challenges faced by the queer community in the modern era. This production challenges the notion that equality has been achieved by the Pride movement; it is a call to arms for those who continue to suffer and are silenced.
POSTCARDS FROM THE FUTURE
"Genocide. Fuck. What a small word; surprisingly heavy."
The Floating Man; the Last Great American Redwood; the Oil Princess; the Nuclear Angel; four souls trapped on the brink of ecological disaster as they make their final ploys for survival.
Postcards from the Future is a collection of monologues and duologues centred on climate catastrophe. Tackling flash floods, deforestation, drought and nuclear apocalypse, these snapshots are presented as found relics of a civilisation destroyed by corporate greed and capitalist gain.
HUSK
“Feast without profit.”
The Midstone Mall off Highway 7, once the beating heart of bustling small town America, now an abandoned relic standing dead in the shadow of forgotten towns. But on Prom Night as two highschoolers break in to escape, the Mall begins to revive and there are banshees starting to scream.
Husk is a deep dive into the dangerous cycle of destruction American capitalism has entrenched into its citizens and
begs its audience to question: how far will we consume,
and is there any escape?
