Millar’s emergency an award winner

Once a year Griffin Theatre awards $5000 to the most outstanding play submitted throughout the year. This year Damien Millar took out the Griffin Award, with his play Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.
Ideas for the play had been brewing for about two years, Millar said, but the final product took only two weeks to write.
Emergency Sex is an adaptation of a book by Ken Cain, which follows three United Nations workers through the trouble spots of Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, in the nightmare times of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Writing a play about real people and real lives can be extremely powerful, Millar said.
We often go for small lives and small victories and the challenges that face most of us every day, he said.
I wanted to take a different direction, to tell an international story. We are very quick to criticise America for the way they produce their stories, with an American hero who saves the day.
But in Australia, we also seem to be unable to tell a story about the world unless we place an Australian there to witness it.
Millar was born in Papua New Guinea in 1970. He travelled to a number of different countries and saw his first coup as a young man in Fiji. When he was 26 his father was killed in Papua New Guinea, propelling Millar to follow his dreams.
I knew it was time to refocus and remember what it was I loved about life, he said.
And what that was, was theatre, so I helped out on as many productions as I could and eventually went to NIDA as a director.
Millar’s last play, Cop Stories, was short-listed for the Griffin Award last year. Past winners of the Griffin award include Mary Rachel Brown with Australian Gothic, Ian Wilding with The Carnivores, Debra Oswald with Mr Bailey’s Minder and Brendan Cowell with Rabbit.