Spanning five decades from 1962 to 2017, The Lewis Trilogy follows Louis Nowra’s occasional hero, sometime narrator and perennial misfit, Lewis, as he struggles to find and understand his place in the changing world around him.
In Summer of the Aliens, Lewis is a young man on the cusp of adulthood, growing up in a Melbourne housing commission. Set against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, the play is a coming-of-age story about sex and family, alien invasions, and suburban tragedies played out behind closed doors.
In Così, Lewis is fresh out of university and directing Mozart’s Così fan tutte with the inmates of a mental institution. As anti-Vietnam protests take place in the streets outside, Lewis finds himself stepping off the sidelines to become emotionally involved with his actors’ lives.
In This Much is True, Lewis is a writer ‘between divorces’ and temporarily adrift among the outsiders and dropouts of an inner-city Sydney pub. Older, and possibly wiser, Lewis is once more drawn into a world of colourful characters, all of them searching for magic in the mundane.
Lewis’ constant search for connection plays out against the evolving hopes and battles of Australian society — just like us, only more extraordinary.
