KEY POINTS:
Ten years ago, Laurence Dolan went where most new fathers fear to tread - or at least get the opportunity to. He stayed home for six months. With first-hand knowledge of what life as a stay-at-home dad is like, Dolan has written a play inspired by his experiences.
He describes Daddy's Home as a fish-out-of-water comedy about a man in a woman's world.
Aaron Ward plays Bruce, a young father bringing up his baby while wife Rebecca (played by Li-Ming Hu) returns to work. While she deals with "mother guilt" about pursuing her career, Bruce negotiates the fraught world of competitive coffee groups, toy libraries and baby gym classes.
Bruce gets a little help along the way from newfound friend Roger (Jonathan Hodge) who is full of useful advice and well-intentioned tips and hints.
"Daddy's Home touches on all thedilemmas new parents have and the various attitudes they have to negotiate," says Dolan. "When you think about it, groups of people are thrust together when the only thing they have in common is the fact they have just had a baby. All their different views and competing attitudes do make for great comedy."
Dolan has been writing plays since 2000. He and his wife, journalist Barbara Fountain, shared parental leave duties for the first year of each of their two children, Madeleine, 10, and Nat, 8.
Dolan used nap times to experiment with a long-held ambition to write plays. His first play, Making Friends, about a woman with Alzheimer's disease, was workshopped by the Auckland Theatre Company's literary unit in 2002.
The two-day workshop provided Dolan, an avid theatregoer, with new information about the way writers, directors and actors can work together to develop a script. It also provided valuable encouragement to keep writing.
Dolan, a solid waste consultant, had previously written papers relating to his work, including the New Zealand Landfill Management Guidelines on how to plan, set up and run rubbish dumps.
In 1992, when Dolan won a local government scholarship to visit North America, he spent his days at landfill sites and his nights at the theatre seeing as many productions as he could.
Initially he juggled fulltime work with writing plays but four years ago gave up his job to concentrate on his first love. He has now written six plays and helped to found the Auckland Playwrights' Collective.
With his children now in primary school, Dolan was able to reflect on their early years and his experiences as a stay-at-home dad. He started writing Daddy's Home about two years ago, using his own memories on which to base a script he describes as comic and poignant.
"At coffee group, for example, you discover pretty quickly that women and men certainly don't talk about the same things and that women don't hold back just because there is a man in the room. I learned a lot more about women's opinions of sex and birth than I ever reckoned on."
Daddy's Home had a public reading last year and, after receiving positive feedback, Dolan decided to put a considerable chunk of his own money into producing a season. It is his first staging of a full-length play.
Friend Tony Forster, whom Dolan met through the Auckland Theatre Company and describes as a mentor, directs while Cherie James and Elizabeth McGlinn complete the cast.
Performance
What: Daddy's Home, by Laurence Dolan
Where and when: The Basement, Sept. 23-Oct. 4