A cabaret-style show directed by Dena Kennedy, it debuted in Auckland last year and had people begging for tickets.
Inspired by private letters, interviews and family myths, it tells a story loosely based on Bright's parents' romance, which started when, in their teens, Rose and Eric met near the daffodils by Hamilton Lakes. It's the same place Eric's parents had met 20 years earlier.
Keenly interested in crossover drama - the interplay between theatre, cabaret, indie opera, physical theatre, text and popular music - Bright set the story to a mix tape of New Zealand artists like Crowded House, Bic Runga, Chris Knox, The Mint Chicks, Dave Dobbyn and many more.
"One of my challenges in writing Daffodils was to think of ways to tell a story where people are holding back [from expressing themselves] because I think in New Zealand we are more reserved and there's a lot we don't say," she says.
The music became a way for characters to express themselves. It's about creating a conversation and the songs are the means to do that because the characters are never singing to each other but to the audience."
It unfolds against a backdrop of 1960s Kodak stills, Super 8 home movies, and fashion photography by Garth Badger, and the songs aren't arranged in chronological order, instead playing where they fall best in the story.
For a production concerned with what's unsaid, Bright did a fair amount of talking to bring it all together. She interviewed family members, including her mother and, because of the sensitive nature of some of their recollections, provided constant reassurances it would be handled with care. She told them it was a story based on fact but certain elements would be made more theatrical while some sections would be pure fiction.
Nevertheless, Bright was justifiably nervous when Daffodils, then a work-in-progress, had its first showing. Emerson and Davis performed on a bare stage to an audience of family, friends and industry representatives.
"I wanted to provoke a particular emotion and response - and I'm not going to say what that is - and I didn't know whether I would succeed until people came and saw the show," she recalls. "I knew it was going to work when I got the reaction I had hoped for."
After the show, a colleague approached Bright and confessed he'd been wondering why he should leave home on a Sunday evening to see a play with songs about her family. He said he left believing he had seen one of the most important works written in New Zealand and which was far bigger than the story of one family.
"He was right about my family being quite average but there's always universality to the specific and the extraordinary is often found in the ordinary. As well as the story about people falling in love, it's very much about New Zealand and what the country went through in the 1980s."
The test audience said not to change a thing, but Bright wanted to incorporate the live band and mixed-media imagery. Her own extraordinary history gave her - and the rest of the team - the confidence to back those decisions.
After a masters degree in Creative and Performing Arts (Drama) from Auckland University, Bright headed to New York and completed a second masters (in Fine Arts) from New York University and made a name for herself as a screenwriter/composer/librettist with readings and cabaret performances staged in the United States, Europe and back home. She is the only New Zealander to be a resident librettist at the American Lyric Theatre in New York.
Despite her success, Bright says after six years in the Big Apple she wanted to come home to tell New Zealand stories. Though Daffodils is set to tour New Zealand (and possibly overseas), she'll remain in Auckland to work on Bullet Heart Club's next narrative cabaret, The Deliberate Disappearance of My Friend, Jack Harnett, and take up the six-month University of Auckland Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre in Devonport.
She plans to write the libretto for an indie opera about Neil Roberts, the punk anarchist who blew himself up in 1982 outside New Zealand's first police computer base. Bright came across the story while researching for the film script, Petrol Head, set in Hamilton during the 1981 Springbok tour.
"He was depicted by the media as some sort of 'mad bomber' but he was peaceful and idealistic and I got curious about what drove him to do what he did and why most of us, certainly those of us in our 30s and under, have never heard of him."
