Claudia Barrie to Direct Immersive Production of TIME STAND STILL at the NEW TAP Gallery

Producer and performer Emily J Stewart, has put together a powerhouse team to bring Donald Margulies' critically-acclaimed, Tony award nominated Time Stands Still to the re-emerging TAP Gallery in an innovative and immersive production that will have audiences on the edge of their seats.

Time Stands Still is set in the Brooklyn home of Sarah, a photo journalist, and her war-correspondent boyfriend, James. Together they have shared a passion for reporting on the world's war zones and have led an adrenaline-fueled life telling stories from the razor's edge between life and death. Sarah has been forced to return home injured and disfigured from an IED explosion she was caught in while covering the war in Iraq. James also returned from the same war months earlier after the stress and horrors finally become too much for him. Both are forced to carry their scars into the loft they share making a damaged and often awkward attempt to regain the domestic normalcy that is so strikingly alien to the world they knew in Iraq. When thrown together with an old friend and his much younger girlfriend, Sarah and James' attempts at a conventional life become even more fractured and strained, powerfully depicting how much is required to keep a 'normal' life alive.

From Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies, Time Stands Still poses questions of love, duty, pain, honesty, questions of family versus career and the cost of creating war coverage for mass consumption - can a human being live with the knowledge that perhaps they should have intervened rather than passively capturing a violent moment through a lens? And once the veil of war has been pulled back can a person ever truly return to the life they once led, or will they forever be drawn to the destruction and devastation of conflict?

Under the extraordinary directorial eye of Claudia Barrie, this production of Time Stands Still explores these questions while fully immersing the audience in the play's world. The new Artists' Space at the re-formed TAP Gallery will be transformed by the show's design team into a New York City loft where the audience will find themselves seated within James and Sarah's home rather than outside the fourth wall of conventional theatre. Emily J Stewart, discovered the script for Time Stands Still 5 years ago and has ever since been working to "create a performance that was confronting, within a space where the actors could lose themselves and make it so intimate the audience forget they are watching a play but find themselves in someone living room. You have the audience sitting so closely there is no room to hide."

Claudia Barrie, also passionate about embracing the use of unconventional spaces, jumped at the chance to work with Stewart and her team on this production, she says;

"With the limited performance venues available to artists right now we need to think outside the square. The audience get a huge buzz being so close to the actors and become completely entwined in their journey."

The superbly crafted world of Time Stands Still, is full of characters is so well rounded, ideas so human and questions so fundamental that it remains as timely as ever. This lauded script together with the artistry and bravery of Emily J Stewart, Claudia Barrie and the rest of the supreme cast and crew, have cultivated a production of Time Stands Still that is dangerous, confronting, honest, funny, at times uncomfortable and thought provoking when the desire to move forward clashes with the instinct to stay comfortably - or even painfully - in place, to stand still.

Performances take place 1-25 November. For tickets and more information visit www.eclipseproductions.com.au.