CORE Confronts Young Love and Young Realities

Words by Madeline Kain (she/her) and Hattie Salmon (she/her)

CORE is a two-person play set entirely in a Wellington apartment, capturing the raw and bittersweet relationship between Asa (Thomas Steinmann) and Erika (Hattie Salmon), a couple in their early 20s.

CORE began in a playwriting workshop at the IIML, where playwright Hattie Salmon and director Madeline Kain were paired together as feedback partners and quickly became friends. Hattie wrote this play over six hyper-focused months. Since then, the script has continued to evolve through rehearsal ( even now, less than two weeks out from opening night). 

The set, designed by Sid Williams, explores the idea that a bedroom can encompass someone's entire world. Asa and Erika’s bed is at the centre of the stage, including the audience in their private and cosy environment. Loose sheets hang over the bed, creating the mood of a slumber party; a shelter under a makeshift fort.

Williams utilises repurposed and upcycled materials for a handmade, lived-in look that represents the realities of student living. The set is completely stripped back, true to the essentials of a student apartment: a bed, a window, a chest, a random collection of books, and some other trinkets and treasures. 

As students, the CORE cast and crew don’t have an abundance of time or money. A simple and carefree atmosphere felt authentic to our lives, as well as those of the characters.  

Main character Asa is a recent graduate of architecture school and likes the idea of design and space reflecting the inhabitants. He thinks the stacked up apartment blocks housing students illustrate their realities.

“Think of it like levels. Down the bottom, you’ve got the students who don’t need the sunlight. They’re paying a lot less. But they don’t care [...]Then on those top floors you’ve got bird people. Fly-highers. The ones that will pay that little bit more than the rest of us just for a tiny sliver of sunlight at 5 p.m. every day, a half hour of inspiration […] It’s not unnatural. It’s all stacked up like the real world," says Asa.

Without giving too much away, an intersecting plot-line throughout the play follows a homeless woman and her baby. They sometimes sit outside the supermarket and will catch the bus round the city to avoid the harshness of mid-winter Wellington weather.

Erika fixates on them, unable to shake the feeling that she can’t do enough to help, that she and this woman have something in common despite never having spoken.  This is a feeling indivisible from being a student in Wellington during the housing crisis. It’s wherever you go; on your walk to university, outside the clubs and bars of Cuba Street and Courtenay Place, on bus rides, supermarket runs, and even sometimes at your front doorstep. How much of yourself you are able to give can be upsettingly limited.

Erika is not a saint, nor is she particularly selfless. Desperate as she is to love and live in this city, she finds the inhumanity of it impossible to ignore.

"It pisses me off, all this anti-homeless stuff—the sprinklers in alleyways, the weird shaped benches. We make living so expensive I can’t even imagine. People struggle just feeding themselves and she’s out there with this little thing, and the least I can do is say something kind," says Erika.

Core is showing from 30 March-1 April at BATS Theatre.