Based on her conversations in the Buninyong Football Club’s canteen, Think of Me on Thursdays was conceived and written in four weeks by Miranda Donald, as she reckoned with her father’s decline in hospital from a heart attack last year. 

“I’d always said I was going to write a play,” she said.

“But it was like an enforced situation, you kind of had a lot of time on your hands but you kind of didn’t.” 

“We’re sort of performing at the time where he was struggling in hospital and facing his mortality, and I think the play has a little bit of that in it.” 

It’s a high energy piece with seven performers, predominately women, gossiping and sharing their aspirations in the confines of a hyper-masculine environment. 

Actress Janette Baxter said the pieces comes “from the heart” on issues faced by men and women in middle age. 

“At this time of our life, there’s a lot of stuff going on,” she said. “You’ve got kids or parents where there’s issues, or you look at your own life and go, ‘what am I doing? Is this where I wanted to be?’” 

Ms Donald said everything on stage “either did happen” or is 80 per cent true, with some artistic license taken. She said while the men were important to the action, the women aren’t “sitting around having cups of tea”, they’re driving the plot and are each on their own journey.  

But having become so enmeshed with the play – writing, directing and starring in it – she said might not direct something she’d written in the future. 

“Because it was something so close, I’d written it and knew it inside out, it would have been very hard to give to someone else first,” she said. 

“The first time, it’s sort of like your little baby, you need to bring it to life the way you see it.”

Performances at 9pm on August 1-4 at Housey Housey, with a matinee on Saturday at 2pm. Tickets $25. More information at www.trybooking.com/390255