Dave Brings Home A Wife (dramatic reading)

A tender, wry portrait of young marriage transplanted into the Australian bush, where love must negotiate with stubborn traditions and even more stubborn fathers. Dave Rudd, second son of the famed Dad Rudd, has brought home a "Girl from Town" named Lily White, and the couple expects to settle into married life on the sprawling Rudd property. But Lily soon discovers that rural life demands sacrifices she never anticipated: friction with Dave's sister Sarah, the endless petty supervisions of extended family, and Dad Rudd's peculiar conviction that newlyweds must earn their comforts the hard way. The old man's solution to his son housing needs is a forty-year-old abandoned shack, dragged from the bush and re-erected with all its gaps, leaks, and memories intact. Rudd's genius lies in finding humor and pathos in the universal battle between generations, where the older one's frugality reads as love and the younger one's ambition reads as ingratitude. This is Australian pastoral comedy at its finest: understated, affectionate, and achingly real.