I am a writer, masseur, world-record holding video gamer and friend of the natural environment, much like Captain Planet but without the Spandex and super powers (super powers come at a price). As well as being an author and playwright, I'm the Festival Director of the world's largest short play festival, Short+Sweet Sydney. I'm also Short+Sweet Theatre's Literary Manager. Just for fun, when I'm not doing the above, I run a natural therapies clinic and a small publishing company and I coordinate a monthly theatre event called Crash Test Drama.

There are heaps of free downloads: short stories, plays, and excerpts from three of my novels - including Eyes And Knives, which has been published by Helm Publishing. If your theatre company is looking for a play to stage, I am currently offering my 10 minute plays for free!

See my latest news.


PETE'S LIFE AND STUFF
NEWS
Best Comedy, People's Choice Award, Best New Talent!
Tonight, V.D. cleaned up the awards at Short+Sweet Brisbane 2011. We won Best Comedy, People's Choice Award for the festival, and the talented actor Kaitlyn Rogers was awarded Best New Talent.

Obviously I'm swaggering around feeling good about myself right now, but what I really want to do is thank Kaitlyn and the director Amy Wollstein. It's always an honour to have your work produced by talented people and these guys are undoubtedly right up there. We're looking at extending the show to a one-act or full-length play and touring it around to some other festivals now. Thanks girls. I'm looking forward to the video.

I also have the honour of being the only Short+Sweet participant to be involved in three Gala Finals in one year, with three different scripts no less! Now it's time to write something new...


Two Gala Finals in one day
Earlier this week I came home to discover that my short play, V.D., has made its way into the Gala Finals of Short+Sweet Brisbane with the highest percentage of the audience vote in Short+Sweet Brisbane's history. After winning Best Drama at the festival last year, I'm absolutely thrilled to be back in the Finals with a comedy.

This play has also been selected for Short+Sweet Sydney 2012, with Lisa Eismen as director. Lisa is incredibly talented and was the first person to direct my play The Goon, which has now gone on to have over a dozen productions around ze world.

Yesterday, I found out that a different play, The Flowers, has been selected for the Gala Finals of Short+Sweet Melbourne. Both are on Sat 12th November. The Flowers is also in the Crash Test Drama Finals in December. Yay!


Appointment as Festival Director of Short+Sweet Sydney
Using dress sense as their number one criterion for selection, I have just been appointed by Short+Sweet as the Festival Director for their Sydney festival. This is the largest short play festival in the entire world, with an upcoming season of 180x 10 minute plays.

This is a fantastic opportunity for me to contribute to the arts. I'm very excited to help around about 800 artists get their work on stage, not to mention the prestige, challenge and mental stimulation of the job. At this point now, near the end of July, we have several months of hardcore planning, auditioning and workshopping before the festival even begins. Whoo!


V.D. wins the inaugural Crash Test Cronulla
A short story I adapted into a monologue today won the Judges' Choice at the first ever Crash Test Cronulla. This short play was wonderfully performed by Greer Adams (who introduced herself to me with, "I'm not an actress" before taking out the Best Actress award) and expertly directed by Maryellen George. Greer, Maryellen and myself are already planning on taking V.D. to another stage. Keep your eye on my Performances column top left and you can read the script on my plays page.


The Devil's Aftershave in the Gala Finals
My 10 minute play The Devil's Aftershave won a spot in the Gala Finals of Short+Sweet Sydney 2011, the 10th anniversary of the largest short play festival in the world. The play, along with12 others, was performed at NIDA's Parade Theatre, which seats over 700 people!


I found a perfect Five Leaf Clover!
Today I found a perfect five leaf clover (click on the image to enlarge).

Four leaf clovers are supposed to bring you luck. What the hell does a five leaf clover mean?


I am disgusted
This week I have two plays on at Short+Sweet Sydney, the world's largest festival of 10 minute plays. Today (should I date my news entries?) my play Disgusted was awarded 3rd Place in the Judges' Vote. Not bad, not bad. But I am super excited about the play I have on next week - The Mostly Sleeping Princess by Geraldine Aegerter, co-directed by myself and Grant Maundrell. We've put in a massive amount of effort in costumes and the set, I paid a talented artist to make us some posters, and our actors are going great with what I am officially declaring the Best Project I've Ever Worked On. If you're reading this, get tickets. It's going to be awesome.


Hooray for child abuse!
My 10 minute monologue The Devil's Aftershave recently won Best Drama in the Gala Finals of Short + Sweet Brisbane - 20th Nov 2010 (out of 750+ entries). This play is about a man with an incredibly heightened sense of smell who talks about his past through the odours he's encountered during his lifetime, revealing some nastiness in his childhood. Check the play out here.

This play is being performed as part of Short + Sweet Sydney 2011, so come along and check it out in February!


Plays, publishing and some other p word to make a nice alliterative heading
Lately, I've had a lot of plays in the mixer. My first international play was performed in Singapore and August sees three Pete Malicki plays performed. On the 2nd, the play my creative writing class collaboratively wrote - The Hero - came third in the finals of Crash Test Drama, an event I run but am not sophisticated enough to rig. A new monologue Disgusted is being performed at Writers' Anonymous on the 16th, and another new play - What If?, where Hitler gets accepted into art school due to an administrative error - will be performed at the next installment of Crash Test on the 30th.

My publishing company is in the late stages of preparing The Ten Minute Witch by Geraldine Aegerter for publication. This is a super cute children's illustrated story, which you can read more about here. A very talented illustrator and artist, Hannah Neale, added her talents to this one and I can't wait to have the printed copies at hand!

Other than my own plays and running Crash Test, I'm selecting 10 minute plays which have either won awards or received several stagings to publish by Helm Publishing: www.booksbyhelm.com. I'd like to have about a dozen high-quality scripts which theatres and schools can use for both training and performances.

So it's all p words here.

And now I'm thinking of penises.


Pete goes international
Finally, my fans in Singapore have something to be excited about. I have had a play accepted for Short + Sweet Singapore, being staged somewhere in July or early August. Only 40 short plays will be used in this festival out of an entry pool of hundreds.

You can read the play, a 10 minute monologue called The Devil's Aftershave, on my plays page.


Going Down wins the audience vote!
My play Going Down was staged for a week as part of Short + Sweet Sydney, performed at NIDA. The audience were goodly enough to name my play as the best of the week (each person voted for one of the ten plays performed on the night). This made Going Down the 9th most popular play in the entire festival of over 100 plays! Thanks to everyone who voted for us.

Review
In the People’s Choice brilliant young Sydney playwright Pete Malicki came out on top with his surprising and funny Going Down, directed with pin-point precision by another talented youngster, Lincoln Hall, who also appeared in the production.

Going Down polled a strong 18.9% of the audience vote for the week, just failing to qualify for the Gala Final as the highest ranked People’s Choice recipient, excluding those plays that have already qualified for the Gala Final as Judge’s Choice’s for their respective Top 100 week.

Eight people in one broken-down elevator for ten minutes – but there’s only five minutes of oxygen left! The big cast of Challito Browne, Kirby Burgess, Karen Cobban, Jim Gosden, Judy Hall, Lincoln Hall, Dave Neville and Paul Treacy had almost as much fun as the audience.

Watch Going Down on YouTube


Pete's plays available for free
Taking after my friend Alex Broun, one of the world's leading writers of 10 minute plays (he had over 150 productions last year alone!), I've posted my plays for free download on this site. If your school or theatre company is looking for something to perform or play around with, you are welcome to use any of my 10 minute plays. There's everything from vampire-zombies to sex addicts to rebellious parents. All I ask is that you send me the details of your production, including names of cast and directors, photos, videos, reviews - anything you have.

My one-act and full-length plays can also be found here. Contact me if you'd like to use them.

Eyes And Knives available online, internationally
An Australian online bookseller, www.fishpond.com.au, is now selling my book through their site. Not only would purchasing it be supporting myself and a great Aussie company, Fishpond are offering the book at a discounted price. You can get your hands on Eyes And Knives for less than $20. That makes me want to drink more coffee and stare menacingly at you.

See reviews and buy it here


Plays on YouTube
I have been co-writing a book of fairy tales with Geraldine Aegerter, a Swiss author. We recently adapted one for the stage. It was performed as a moved reading as part of Crash Test Drama, and I did a shonky job of filming it for your enjoyment.

The Mostly Sleeping Princess
Click here to watch.


The play below was filmed at Stage Rage at the Australian College of Theatre and Television (ACTT). It's about what happens when you give a Christian boy porn on his 18th birthday.

The New Crack
Click here to watch.


Eyes And Knives on sale in Sydney
That's right, Eyes And Knives is on sale in select bookstores around Sydney. You can find yourself a copy in the following stores:

Lindfield Bookshop
St Ives Book Review
Berkelouw Books, Newtown - where I was named "Book of the Week!!"
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown
Gleebooks Glebe
Galaxy Books
Dymocks Macquarie
Abbey's Bookstore

All other bookstores suck. That's right, they suck. Get in ahead of the phenomenon, or you can purchase it directly from this site by sending an email to Helm Publishing to request an invoice.

Order Eyes And Knives
helmpublishing@gmail.com


Eyes And Knives on tape
If you are the kind of person who listens to books in their car or on their music players, then fear not, for I have catered for ye. I've just posted Part I of Eyes And Knives - the free audiobook - on archive.org. You can follow this link to download it!


Play available on YouTube
My new play Like, Totally was performed as part of the top 100 for the international play festival, Short & Sweet. We filmed it and you can see it on YouTube. It came in 3rd place for its week (out of 11 plays). You can also download the script from this site.

Written by Pete Malicki
Directed by Lincoln Hall

Cast