Sugarland is a short but telling piece developed out of ATYP workshops and research about the lives of young people in the Northern Territory town of Katherine. These teenagers are a right mixture; they might be Indigenous or white; some are refugees.

Katherine is an isolated town in the middle of the outback, despite its McDonald's, its skate park and its schools. The play shows something of how the young people in this place see their world, and how they deal with its undoubted difficulties.

On a sand-covered stage shaped by concrete slabs and benches, Nina (Dubs Yunupingu) describes the Indigenous map of the place with the addition of school, football, boxing, roads, cars, shops and rules and regulations, and the interrelationships of all of this.

Nina is good at school and has come to Katherine to stay with her aunty, but living conditions are difficult and crowded. Jimmy (Calen Tassone) is not tuned into school and struggles with an injury that stops him playing football. But if he doesn't go to school he is not eligible for prizemoney in the song contest. Erica (Xanthe Paige) is from an RAAF family posted to Katherine, new to the town, isolated on the military base and running to self-harm. Cheerful Aaron (Narek Arman) is a refugee from the Middle East. His affable white mate Charles (Jonas Thomson) seems content to drift along with the place and what it might offer.

The key to the success of this piece is it avoids a parade of issues. It quickly becomes an absorbingly truthful sketch of these lives. Those airconditioned classrooms are normal to white Erica but "cold" to those for whom 40C is normal, and they are run on patterns that have little to do with enduring trauma or cultural obligations. These young people work with what they have got, often within a rigid official framework represented by well-meaning youth worker Penny (Eliza Logan), who is caught between rules and realities and needs.

Erica is heads down with a phone and cutting herself and joining Jimmy in death-courting "choking" games. Friendships develop, Erica and Nina over their singing and their music, the boys over sport, especially boxing. Nina is driven to extreme measures to qualify for a change in housing. But getting pregnant means leaving school in Katherine.

The scenes are short and to the point. The performances are direct and truthful. But it's Nina's vision that drives the piece in the end, backed by the tremendous poise and authority of Yunupingu's performance. She sees the bigger picture of country and its needs. She describes a boy who sees a river turn brown when it should be running clear and the question is turned onto the audience: "How are we going to fix country?"

Sugarland's power is that it leaves us looking for the answers. A pity its season here was so brief.