The Season opens with "beautiful chaos" - the noisy rustle of wings passing over Japan, Alaska and New Zealand before the mutton-bird flock comes to roost on Big Dog Island, somewhere between Tasmania and the mainland. Usually, Big Dog is empty. But with the birds come the birders.
This includes The Duncans, headed by elders Ben (Kelton Pell) and Stella (Tammy Anderson). With them are their son Ritchie (Luke Carroll), Stella's sister Marlene (Lisa Maza) and daughter Lou (Nazaree Dickerson), back for the first time in years with her teenage son Clay (James Slee). Cousin Dickie (Trevor Jamieson) is also around, now head ranger in the area. Together they'll spend six weeks on the sandy scrap of land, harvesting the muttonbirds as they have for generations.
Families are intrinsically messy things and by using the full depth and width of the stage Director Isaac Drandic has managed capture all the tangential threads tangled in this loving knot. Like real life, much of the story occurs in the peripheries while the players are wrapped up in their own dramas. While the boys are out birding Stella packs up the kitchen, or sits with a cup of tea in quiet concern. As the Island's transitory population sinks VBs around a beach fire aunty Marlene fools about with an old flame in the hills.
Like any good story, The Season is in many ways universal. It's a play about collisions; between family, and families, tradition and progress, between cultures, fear and growth, everything and time. It's about trusting that your loved ones can weather all that without you, and will be there for you when you can't. But it's also a deeply Indigenous tale. Drandic, all seven actors and writer Nathan Maynard are from the First Nations — and through that lens, Maynard doesn't dissect Aboriginal life so much hold it up warmly, inviting us to take part in deeply rich traditions and culture.
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Individually each member of the cast turns in a fantastic, layered performance. Slee's gangly Clay, full of youthful bravado that's constantly heartbroken by his deadbeat dad. Jamieson's Dickie, torn between pride for his uniform and shame at being seen as an extension of white authority. Kelton Pell's Ben, cut off from change and his son by his own gruff love.
But possibly the true standout is Tammy Anderson as family matriarch Stella. The flock follows the pilot bird and on Big Dog Island, it's good luck to catch the pilot and dreadfully bad luck to kill it. But what happens when it's dying on its own? At the beginning of The Season it's revealed that Stella is having heart problems, and Anderson's understated portrayal of a woman trying to protect her family while letting them go is beautifully affecting.
