The Youthful Adventures of Damon Dukirk

About the Project

The Youthful Adventures of Damon Dukirk is an episodic monologue about the peripatetic and hedonistic life of a poet who moves from great triumphs to dismal failures. Written by award-winning Australian playwright, Kieran Carroll and performed by acclaimed Brooklyn-based actor, Zach Wegner, the work is both comedy and tragedy and requires only a minimal setting.

Utilizing a combination of ornate and prosaic language, Damon Dukirk speaks of the successes, the poor decisions, the romantic dreams and great hopes he has for his literary life. Beginning in the unnamed province of his birth, Damon Dukirk takes an idiosyncratic path through central Germany, Iceland, Portugal, Sydney and into the Pacific Ocean. Dukirk moves blindly and quickly from an anachronism, to a cult figure, to the great dreamer of world poetry. Along the way, other characters help and infuriate: Frankie from Frankfurt, his financial benefactor, Cavendish Moulash, a gothic singer-songwriter who is popular in Portugal, a girlfriend who is now a major literary success and a sadistic arts bureaucrat determined to make him suffer for his art.

The Youthful Adventures of Damon Dukirk is a work about idealism and a lack of practicality, of hedonism and romanticism, of long nights out and the joy and creating new writing. It relishes language and anecdote. The writing attempts both a spirited high energy and a self-absorbed, comic melancholy. The play is also a rites-of-passage story, but with Dukirk growing up much later than many others!