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- September 2010
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Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch -
Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille -
Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest -
Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest -
Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street -
Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings
15 Seconds
A young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother with cerebral palsy. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
1949
By David French
Newfoundland joins Confederation in the continuing saga of the Mercer family. Cast of 6 women, 6 men and 2 male children.
2000
By Joan MacLeod
The relationships of the young, the aging and the middle-aged, and between urban life and nature at the end of the millennium. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
400 Kilometres
The third play in Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, an urban professional who has discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung, is pregnant and must come to grips with the question of her true identity. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
7 Stories
In this fast-paced, sophisticated and hilarious play, a man’s contemplation of suicide leads to a charming and surprising ending. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
A Line in the Sand
By Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef
A young Palestinian is befriended, then tortured and murdered by Canadian soldiers during Operation Desert Storm. Cast of 3 to 5 men.
Abraham Lincoln Goes to The Theatre
Steven Bush is a man on a mission—to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins occupy the White House of a country that, even today, after electing its first African American president, still seems bent on world domination? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” (so the story goes) do to end the madness and redeem the family name? Steven Bush’s one-man standup comedy, rant, political protest, and call for the war-crimes trials of both George H. W. and George W. Bush is a brash theatrical tour de force that dares his audiences to accompany him on a personal quest for evidence of honesty, decency, and complicity in a world of damning facts and murky conspiracy theories.
Adrift
In this play inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile, by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, a group of urban Egyptian hipsters engages in debates about secularism and “fundamentalism” with tragic consequences.” Cast of 4 women and 6 men.
Albertine in Five Times
Tremblay presents the powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. Together, the five Albertines provide a moving portrait of an extraordinary “ordinary” woman in this Chalmers Award-winning play. Cast of 6 women.
Albertine in Five Times.
The powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five times in her life. Cast of 6 women.
All Fall Down
By Wendy Lill
A play about modern day witch-hunting. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
All the Verdis of Venice
Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.
alterNatives
Native activists and environmentally concerned vegetarians are invited to a dinner party, where irreconcilable cultural differences clash over moose roast and vegetarian lasagna. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
Amigo’s Blue Guitar
By Joan MacLeod
A college student’s life changes when he chooses to sponsor a Salvadoran refugee as a class project. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
Another Country / bloom
Two plays, on Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976–83, and on hope flowering in the midst of destruction, constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.
Another Home Invasion
By Joan MacLeod
We in the civilized Western world live in a space inviolate. “Our home is our castle,” the saying goes. But in this Governor General’s Award-nominated play, the word “another” conveys both its meanings: something commonplace; and something of an entirely different kind and nature. Of course this perceptively poignant play involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to find there, but is he the real threat to the home’s occupants? He even shows up for a return visit. Who, then, are the real perpetrators of the heartless betrayal of the elderly couple who lives here: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family—their home? The answers to these questions are as surprising as they are unsettling.
Assorted Candies for the Theatre
An exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood, adapted and re-crafted to the stage. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
Baby Blues
A highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the pow wow trail. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
Balconville
The English and French working class get together on their balconies in Montreal. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
Banana Boots
A one-man-show/memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play, Balconville, to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Cast of 1 man.
Beating the Bushes
By Steven Bush
Steven Bush is a man on a mission—to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins occupy the White House of a country that, even today, after electing its first African American president, still seems bent on world domination? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” (so the story goes) do to end the madness and redeem the family name? Steven Bush’s one-man standup comedy, rant, political protest, and call for the war-crimes trials of both George H. W. and George W. Bush is a brash theatrical tour de force that dares his audiences to accompany him on a personal quest for evidence of honesty, decency, and complicity in a world of damning facts and murky conspiracy theories.
Benevolence
Full of excruciating twists of fate and malice, this dark comedy of “trading places” resonates with uncomfortable truths about how we see (or don’t see) the people we live with every day. Cast of 2 women and three men.
Bethune
By Rod Langley
A study of how one man’s vision may shape the world. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
Billy Bishop Goes to War
By John Gray
A musical about Canada’s famous World War I flying ace. Cast of 2 men.
Boiler Room Suite
By Rex Deverell
The broken lives and the heroic struggle for joy of two “tramps” in a hotel boiler room. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.
Bonjour, Là, Bonjour
A beloved brother returns to his family. Cast of 6 women and 2 men.
Bordertown Café
By Kelly Rebar
Young Jimmy faces a dilemma: embrace the hero of American popular myth as embodied by his father, or engage the task of building a different identity, embodied by his mother “on the Canadian side of nowhere.” Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Burning Vision
Dene miners, radium painters and people of Hiroshima labour under the false sun of uranium which poisons their relationships to the earth and to each other. Cast of 5 women and 12 men.
Can You See Me Yet?
A search for sanctuary in an Ontario insane asylum in 1938. Cast of 7 women and 4 men.
Cariboo Magi
Hilarious drama ensues when a bedraggled troupe of players heads into the wilds of the Cariboo to perform a Christmas pageant. Set in the gold rush era, Cariboo Magi is an unabashed celebration of the power of theatre to renew our lives and banish our cares. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Carmela’s Table
The second play in Rossi’s A Carpenter’s Trilogy finds Italian war veteran Silvio in Montreal with his new family and his mother. Deeply traumatized by his wartime experiences, Silvio’s gradual unravelling ultimately threatens to destroy his family. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
Chemainus Theatre presents The Remarkable Emily Carr
The Remarkable Emily Carr
Chemainus Theatre Festival
with Ella Simon as the younger Emily
and Barbara Pollard as the older Emily.
Aug. 25 to Sept. 18
Tickets: $15 (1-800-565-7738)
For more information, visit the Chemainus Theatre Festival web site.
Chimera
By Wendy Lill
This compelling drama by a former parliamentary critic for persons with disabilities explores the ethical controversy and public policy surrounding reproductive technologies, particularly cross-species chimeras. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.
Cold Comfort
By Jim Garrard
Set in Saskatchewan, the geographic centre of Canada, Cold Comfort depicts the complex relationship among three characters. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.
Colours in the Dark
By James Reaney
A mosaic of experiences that form a childhood. Cast of 2 women, 2 men, 1 female child and 1 male child.
Consecrated Ground
By George Boyd
In 1965, Africville, the largest and oldest black community in Canada was bulldozed into memory. What was lost to the politicians of Halifax was an inconvenience, an eyesore. What was lost to the people whose roots ran deep through the once-vibrant community was an entire way of life.
Copper Thunderbird
A multi-layered and visionary drama of a life wracked by both triumph and ordeal, based on the persona of famed Ojibwa artist Norval Morrisseau. Cast of 5 women and 4 men.
Corker
By Wendy Lill
Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous 19th-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
Crabdance
A woman manipulates the men in her life into assuming the stereotypical privatized roles of husband, lover, father and son. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
Cruel Tears
By Ken Mitchell
An innovative “country opera” set in Saskatoon, with a captivating parallel to Shakespeare’s Othello. Cast of 5 women, 10 men and a band.
Cul-de-sac
Written by one of Canada’s most influential postmodern playwrights, this dazzling one-man show is storytelling of the highest order.
Cyrano De Bergerac
An epic and heroic tale that has enchanted generations, in an English prose translation that is immanently readable and stageable. Cast of 5 women and 12 men, plus many minor characters.
Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra
Two interweaving monologues on the sacred and the profane. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Dancock's Dance
The influenza epidemic of 1918, and the ruin and chaos of the First World War resonate through the locked doors and barred windows of an insane asylum and into the lives of the patients confined within. Cast of 1 woman and 5 men.
Democracy
By John Murrell
In the midst of the American Civil War, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson discuss the past, the future, life, love and what it means to be human. Cast of 4 men.
Diplomacy
By Tim Carlson
Nominally about North American military involvement in Middle East wars, this graphic, conflict-fuelled drama scrutinizes the part the media plays in manufacturing our private reactions to foreign policy. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
Divinity Bash / nine lives
Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date: a play in which everything, and therefore nothing, is sacred. Cast of 3 women, 5 men and 1 transgendered person.
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream
In 1876, Jack the Ripper, a.k.a. Canadian Dr. Cream, graduated from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.
Down Dangerous Passes Road
15 years after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Cast of 3 men.
Earshot
Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He blames his hyper-sensitive condition on a physical abnormality; but we’re not so certain. Cast of 1 man.
En Pièces Détachées
The life of a lower-class family in East End Montreal. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
Based on the signing of the Laurier Memorial, this play is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their land, rights and language—in one of the most tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism. Cast of 4 women.
Esker Mike and His Wife, Agiluk
A classic tragedy about Inuit life and how it is affected by white settlers, priests and government officials. Cast of 6 women and 9 men.
Espresso
Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass
By Tom Hendry
A look at post-World War II Canada from a recent high-school graduate’s viewpoint. Cast of 2 women and 9 men.
For Home and Country
The rise of an urban and radicalized feminist agenda in the latter part of the 20th century leads to a head-on collision with its much more conservative, rural roots in the Women’s Institute, founded in 1897. Cast of 16 women and 3 men.
For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again
Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Forever Yours, Marie-Lou
Tremblay’s penetrating analysis of a Quebec family unit. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists
A dramatized inquiry in which five geologists are interrogated on the death of one of their colleagues in the Mekong Delta. Cast of 1 woman and 6 men.
Fronteras Americanas
One man’s struggle to find a home between two cultures, exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. Cast of 1 man.
George Ryga: The Other Plays
By George Ryga
Hoffman provides an effective and multifaceted description for the student seeking a quick understanding of Ryga’s stature as a playwright
— Canadian Literature
George Ryga: The Prairie Novels
By George Ryga
This collection includes Hungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk.
Gideon's Blues
By George Boyd
The profound humanity of Boyd’s characters reminds us that while neither drug abuse nor the breakdown of the traditional family is exclusive to the black community, racism accelerates their destructive effects in ghastly measures. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
It’s into the goldfish bowl of a dysfunctional family that the audience peers with acute recognition, hysterical laughter and an overwhelming sense of the creative healing power of the imagination. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
Goodnight Disgrace
From his wheelchair in a nursing home, Conrad Aiken recalls his long, stormy relations with Malcolm Lowry. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
Halo
When an image of Jesus appears on the side of a Tim Hortons restaurant, the town inhabitants are challenged to ask difficult questions about faith, life and love. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
Heaven
Instantly recognizable multicultural characters play out their coincidental relationships in a park on the outskirts of a city. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
Hellfire Pass
Silvio Rosato shows up at the house of his estranged father and meets the family he raised in Chicago after leaving Silvio in Italy 36 years ago. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
Heroine
By Gail Scott
A woman tries to negotiate her personal passage from Quebec’s politically turbulent ’70s to the threatening bleakness of the ’80s.
Homechild
By Joan MacLeod
Between 1860 and 1930, over 80,000 unaccompanied British children were “exported” to Canadian factories and farms, often exploited there as indentured child labourers. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.
Hosanna
A play about illusions. Cast of 2 men.
Impromptu on Nuns' Island
In an impromptu get-together in an opera diva’s Nuns’ Island penthouse, on the afternoon of her return from Paris, her celebrity mother and her idealistic daughter lie in wait for her. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
In a World Created by a Drunken God
A Canadian half-Native man is thrust into an absurd dilemma when he is asked to be tested for a possible kidney donation to his dying non-Native father, who abandoned him when he was two months old. Cast of 2 men.
In the Eyes of God
A vicious and unsparing look at the talent agencies that remake the Hollywood stars out of the willing clay of their own flesh. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.
In the Eyes of Stone Dogs
By Daniel Danis
Before fleeing her eccentric island community, Djouke is determined to discover the mystery of her paternity. Cast of 4 women and 5 men.
Jacob's Wake
By Michael Cook
A Maritime family’s tragedy, set in a raging storm. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.
Je me souviens
By Lorena Gale
In this powerful dramatic monologue, Lorena Gale reconstructs for the audience her childhood and the experience of coming of age as an African Canadian in Montreal. Cast of 1 woman.
Jitters
By David French
A sophisticated backstage comedy. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
Joe Beef
Desperately poor immigrants find refuge with Montreal’s legendary barkeep, Joe Beef. Cast of 5 women and 5 men.
La Duchesse de Langeais & Other Plays
A collection of five short plays by Quebec’s best known playwright: La Duchesse de Langeais; Berthe; Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs; Surprise, Surprise; and Gloria Star.
La Maison Suspendue
A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. Cast of 3 women, 4 men and 1 male child.
Lawrence & Holloman
Lawrence and Holloman, a hapless nerd and a loquacious salesman, meet by chance. From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter comes a viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot. Cast of 2 men.
Legoland
When Mom and Dad are busted for growing pot, Penny and Ezra Lamb embark on the wild road trip that comprises this vaudeville-inspired one-act play. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Les Belles Soeurs
Michel Tremblay’s classic Joual play. A housewife wins a million trading stamps in a lottery and invites her friends over to help her paste them into books. Cast of 15 women.
Les Canadiens
By Rick Salutin
A play about Quebec and Canada using hockey as a metaphor. Cast of 7 men.
Life Without Instruction
By Sally Clark
A woman’s struggle for freedom, identity and dignity. Cast of 3 women and 5 men.
Listen to the Wind
By James Reaney
Two stories intertwine and illuminate the relationship of life to its creative dream. Cast of 4 women, 4 men, 1 female child and 1 male child.
Local Boy Makes Good
By John Gray
Three musicals by John Gray: 18 Wheels, Rock and Roll and Don Messer’s Jubilee.
Lost Souls & Missing Persons
By Sally Clark
A comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class. Cast of 9 women and 11 men.
Ludwig & Mae
Ludwig, trained as an engineer, hasn’t been able to find work since graduating. The fact that he is sardonic, philosophically inclined, and suicidal hasn’t helped in this regard. Mae, on the other hand, is an actress who has never been out of work. Caught in a relationship of co-dependency, she plays into Ludwig’s constant mind games until one day she decides she’s had enough. This three-play volume includes: Embedded, which establishes Ludwig and Mae’s Strindbergian relationship; Apocalypse, a monodrama in which Ludwig stages his own suicidal ceremonial; and Redemption, Mae’s testimonial, where she confronts and reconciles herself with Ludwig’s death, and finally comes into her own.
Mambo Italiano
Outrageous pathos and hilarity is unleashed when Nino informs his very traditionally Italian parents that he is gay. A perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama that explores family dynamics and the vast spaces between the old world and the new. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.
Marcel Pursued by the Hounds
How our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt us in adult life. Cast of 4 women and 1 adolescent male.
Marion Bridge
Includes screenplay and stage play. Cast of 3 women.
Memories of You
By Wendy Lill
The life of Elizabeth Smart pivoted on a turbulent affair that produced four children and her one book. This is a portrayal of the book as a record of one great life lived. Cast of 4 women and 1 man.
Miss Julie
By August Stringberg & adaptation by David French
A riveting adaptation of a theatre classic about an affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant. Cast of 2 women and 1 man.
Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. I
This fourth edition contains The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Les Belles-Soeurs, Leaving Home, 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt, The St Nicholas Hotel, Zastrozzi, Billy Bishop Goes to War, Balconville, Doc, Drag Queens on Trial and The Occupation of Heather Rose.
Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. II
This fourth edition contains Bordertown Café, Polygraph, Moo, The Orphan Muses, 7 Stories, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, Lion in the Streets, Never Swim Alone, Fronteras Americanas, Harlem Duet and Problem Child.
Mom's the Word
By Linda A. Carson & Jill Daum & Alison Kelly
Humorous stories, bittersweet monologues, poetic reflections and revelatory anecdotes about motherhood.
Nothing to Lose
Working-class survivors of the ’60s stage a workers’ sit-down strike. Cast of 9 men.
Omniscience
By Tim Carlson
The play begs the question of how many of our freedoms have been lost to the institutions engaged in surveillance “for our own protection.”Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
On the Job
On Christmas Eve the workers in a Montreal shipping room get drunk and go on strike. Cast of 8 men.
One Crack Out
By David French
Charlie Evans, a pool shark, has two days to pay off a debt, or have his legs broken by a psychotic debt collector who is also having an affair with his wife. Cast of 2 women and 8 men.
Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth
The emotional struggle of a Native woman who was adopted by a white family to acknowledge her birth family. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Other Schools of Thought
Dramas that encourage adults to reflect on their past and young people to reflect on their future: Life Science, 2B WUT UR and Cost of Living.
Paradise by the River
After Canada officially declares war with Italy, Romano, a recent immigrant, is arrested without charge in his own home. Cast of 2 women and 8 men.
Past Perfect
Unleashing the dark secret of her being, Albertine, one of Tremblay’s most unforgettable heroines, sets out to re-conquer the beau she has lost to her younger sister. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
Playing Bare
A mordant satire on the relation between theatre and life. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
Re: Producing Women’s History
Hadfield traces the process of creating a theatrical “success” and investigates how the politics involved influences what we perceive as “good” playwriting.
Remember Me
Two ex-lovers meet and compare and confess their fears and disillusionments. Cast of 2 men.
Rose
A musical set on the Wasaychigan Hill Reserve in 1992. The battle for the future of the community builds to a shattering climax. Cast of 10 women and 7 men.
Saga of the Wet Hens
Four Quebec women writers meet at the centre of a fabulous vortex. Cast of 4 women.
Saint Frances of Hollywood
By Sally Clark
The tragic life of Frances Farmer, the raucous, idealistic, non-conforming movie star of the ’30s and ’40s. Cast of 4 women and 4 men.
Sainte-Carmen of the Main
A play about cultural identity and cultural awakening based on a country and western singer of Montreal’s “The Main.”
Test
Cast of 4 women, 13 men and a chorus.
Sainte-Marie among the Hurons
A play about the conscience of a priest during the disastrous mission the Jesuits made to the Huron Indians in the 17th century. Cast of 11 men.
Salt-Water Moon
By David French
The third book of the Mercer family saga. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Saucy Jack
In a stately Victorian drawing room, two old friends, James Kenneth Stephen, a scholar, and his former pupil, Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s nephew and heir to the throne, dance around the truth of the identity of London’s most notorious killer, Jack the Ripper, and while a tale of psychological intrigue is played out, an unravelling of tested friendship, betrayal, duplicity, and motive is revealed.
Schoolhouse
Full of warmth and poignant humour this drama set in a one-room schoolhouse evokes a way of life shared by generations of rural North Americans, exploring timeless themes of rejection, of compassion, of damage, of hope. Cast of 5 women and 7 men.
Silver Dagger
By David French
French delivers a thriller guaranteed to have audiences perched on the edge of their seats. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Sisters
By Wendy Lill
A tough uncompromising look at a convent-run Native residential school. The soul-destroying devastation caused by these institutions from the point of view of the nuns running the school. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Six Plays by Mavor Moore
By Mavor Moore
In these theatre pieces stripped to the essentials of character sketches in quick, subtle lines, the emphasis is on the performer’s resources as an actor, rather than the externals of scene changes and stage contexts.
Skydive
By Kevin Kerr
Having grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Morgan (a feckless schemer who has recently reinvented himself as a counsellor) arrives on the doorstep of Daniel (a housebound agoraphobe), offering to help “liberate” his brother by administering his newly invented technique of “Paratherapy.” Convincing Daniel to face his fears by pursuing their long abandoned childhood dream of jumping from an airplane, the brothers begin a series of misguided training exercises to prepare for their adventure.
Soldier's Heart
By David French
Esau Mercer, a veteran of the First World War, tries to persuade his alienated 16-year-old son, Jacob, not to leave. Slowly Esau’s devastating and unsparing account of what secrets lie in his soldier’s heart brings father and son together. Cast of 3 men.
Somewhere Else
Contains Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time: Beyond Mozambique (1974), Zastrozzi (1977), Theatre of the Film Noir (1981) and Nothing Sacred (1988).
Song of the Say-Sayer
By Daniel Danis
Three brothers strive to unite and care for their ailing sister after the death of their adoptive parents. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
Still Laughing
Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector
Georges Feydeau & Maurice Desvallières’ Hotel Peccadillo
Arthur Schnitzler’s The Amorous Adventures of Anatol
Introduction by Jerry Wasserman
The universal mark of good satire is still to make audiences laugh at the worst traits in human nature. Here, in his own words, is how Morris Panych updated these three great comedy classics from a century ago.
Studies in Motion
By Kevin Kerr
Adultery, jealousy, murder and an abandoned child haunt the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Cast of 5 women and 7 men.
Suburban Motel
Six plays that take place in the same hotel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.
Talking Bodies
A collection of Larry Tremblay’s four memorable solo performances for the stage: A Trick of Fate, Anatomy Lesson, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi and Ogre. With an introduction by Jane M. Moss.
That Summer
By David French
A woman returns to the cottage country of Ontario where, 32 years before, she vacationed with her family. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.
That Woman
By Daniel Danis
The story of a woman sent away from her family by her brother the Bishop after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.
The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil
A hard-hitting and hilarious satire. Cast of 4 men.
The Berlin Blues
Concluding Taylor’s Blues Quartet, German developers here show up on the “Otter Lake Reserve” proposing “OjibwayWorld,” a Native theme park designed to attract Europeans tourists to this destination resort. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
The Boy in The Treehouse / Girl Who Loved Her Horses
Two plays about the process of children becoming adults and the nature of, and necessity for, rites of passage in all cultures.
The Buz'Gem Blues
The third play in Taylor’s ongoing zany, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his “Blues Quartet.” Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
The Carpenter
This heart-wrenching but beautifully cathartic story of a family coming to grips with itself unfolds with unmistakably poignant honesty. Cast of 4 women and 5 men.
The Concise Köchel
A lifetime’s devotion to the music of Mozart conceals a gruesome secret. Cast of 4 women.
The Coronation Voyage
Will a Montreal Mafioso sacrifice his young son for safe conduct to England? Cast of 6 women and 8 men.
The Death of René Lévesque
An astonishingly profound and prophetic political drama that delivers the powerful and cathartic stillbirth of a nation, stripped of both pity and fear. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
The Dishwashers
Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an upscale restaurant, tyrannizing his co-workers with his rants of pride of craft and Marxist rhetoric. Cast of 3 men.
The Driving Force
The stormy and angst-filled relationship between Claude and his father Alex is compellingly played out with a cruel and disconsolate irony in an Alzheimer’s ward. Cast of 2 men.
The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept
By Rod Langley
A dark family secret emerges in this second play about the wealthy and ill-fated Dunsmuir family. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge
By Rod Langley
The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families. Cast of 2 women and 6 men.
The East End Plays: Part 1
Contains the Governor General’s Award-winning Criminals in Love (1984), Chalmers Award-winning Better Living (1986) and Escape from Happiness (1987). With an introduction by Jerry Wasserman.
The East End Plays: Part 2
Contains Beautiful City, Love and Anger and Tough.
The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
By George Ryga
A lyric documentary about a young Indian girl who comes to the city only to die on Skid Row. Cast of 5 women and 15 men. Published in seven languages.
The Edward Curtis Project
By Marie Clements
Photographs by
The Edward Curtis Project began when the Presentation House Theatre commissioned Marie Clements to write a play that would stage the issues raised by Curtis’ monumental but controversial achievement—to dramatize not only the creation of his photographic record of “the vanishing race of the North American Indian” and the enormous commitment, unwavering vision, sacrifice, poverty and ultimate disappointment it represented for the photographer, but also the devastating legacy that his often misrepresentative and imposed vision had on the lives of the people he touched.
The Ends of the Earth
Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
The Execution
Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.
The Fairies Are Thirsty
Three women—a housewife, a whore and the Virgin Mary—fight to break out of the stereotypes in which they have been imprisoned for years. Cast of 3 women.
The Faraway Nearby
By John Murrell
Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent alone in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains, in the desert’s dangerous energies, its desolate beauty, until a stranger enters her life. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
The Fighting Days
By Wendy Lill
The polarities of public and private lives, and issues of racism and pacifism in the suffragette movement. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
The Glace Bay Miners' Museum
By Wendy Lill
A story of the ill-fated love between a wandering musician social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
The Great Wave Of Civilization
The destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Alberta and Montana. Cast of 5 women and 13 men.
The Gull
Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is a play written in the classical Noh style. Set in 1950, when wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians had finally been lifted, allowing them to return to the coast, it exquisitely dramatizes the historical link between the fishing town of Steveston, home to many Japanese Canadians, and Mio, the coastal village in Japan from which many of their ancestors originally emigrated. An international collaboration, The Gull featured: Noh master Akira Matsui, declared an Important Intangible Cultural Asset by Japan in 1998, as the main actor; music by American Noh expert Richard Emmert; masks by Wakayama artist Hakuzan Kubo; and a troupe of professional Noh musicians from Japan.
The Heretic
By John Murphy
“If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all-knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us.” Murphy’s play, centred around the playwright’s assumed persona of “Jesus Murphy,” opens up a discourse where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; and secularists confront theists. Cast of 1 man.
The Hope Slide / Little Sister
By Joan MacLeod
Two plays by Joan MacLeod: the Chalmers Award-winning The Hope Slide, and MacLeod’s first play for young audiences, Little Sister.
The Impromptu of Outremont
Three sisters have an “impromptu” and re-examine their personal and social problems. Cast of 4 women.
The Lady Smith
Rather than confront her husband when she sees him with another woman, a blues singer follows the woman and insinuates herself into the other woman’s life. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
The Leisure Society
A dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
The Madonna Painter
At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the Spanish flu epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The presence of the foreign artist, his choice of a local virgin to serve as a model, and the frighteningly strange nature of his work will upset the lives and change the fate of the entire community.
The Magnificent Voyage of Emily Carr
Marchessault evokes the doubts, the trials and the joys of this singular existence. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
The Noam Chomsky Lectures
An innovative, multi-layered deconstruction of mass media and politics. Cast of 2 men.
The Occupation of Heather Rose
By Wendy Lill
Young, naïve and inadequately trained nurse Heather Rose arrives in a remote Native community hoping to improve the lives of its residents, but ends up utterly disillusioned by the impotence of her interventions. Cast of 1 woman.
The Power Plays
First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contains Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979) and The Art of War (1983). These three plays showcase the development and the culmination of Walker’s film noir style.
The Queens
The shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre. Cast of 6 women.
The Real World?
A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.
The Refugee Hotel
Laid bare in the fictionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths both the victims and the survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest, and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals, and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivor—even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future free of fear. More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver in 1974 after Pinochet’s coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre’s attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.
The Riddle of the World
By David French
A stockbroker and an ex-priest get together to console themselves after being abandoned by their mates and are forced to come to terms with their fragile natures as men. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.
The Satchmo' Suite
By Hans Böggild & Doug Innis
A black cellist, on tour with a classical symphony orchestra, invokes the ghost of Louis Armstrong to help him with a difficult passage from Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. The highly mythologized spirit of “the father of jazz himself” takes form in the cellist’s hotel room, where the lives of the characters intertwine and begin to play off each other, and issues of class, hope, courage, family, and race emerge in a lively and powerful struggle between head and heart, intellect and intuition. Ultimately, the drama resolves with the cellist’s beautiful rendition of the Bach piece. Full of great jazz and classical music, but using none of Satchmo’s own compositions, the play incorporates nine original jazz songs, co-written by the author-musicians, into the action.
The Seagull
A revitalization of a Russian theatre classic. Cast of 5 women and 8 men.
The Shape of a Girl / Jewel
By Joan MacLeod
The Shape of a Girl examines the code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized murder of Reena Virk by school-aged bullies in 1997. Jewel is based on the real-life catastrophe of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1982.
The Tale of Teeka
A play set in rural Quebec in the ’50s in which a battered child, Maurice, seeks refuge in a fantasy world. Cast of 1 man and 1 male child.
The Trespassers
When inspector Milton shows up in a town in the middle of nowhere to investigate a mysterious murder, fifteen year-old Lowell’s skills at shaping the truth to protect both himself and those he cares about are put to the ultimate test: shall he plea bargain, or stick to the truth as he understands it? As Hardy once pointed out to him, “There’s something in between lying and not lying. It’s called a story.”
The Trial of Judith K.
By Sally Clark
Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modem business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in the increasingly obscure process.
The Trigger
Based on the author’s own experience as a victim of the Paper Bag Rapist, The Trigger is a play written for anyone who has ever dealt with sexual violation and who continues to live with it at their core. Cast of 5 women.
The Unnatural and Accidental Women
A surrealist dramatization of a notorious 30-year murder case involving many mysterious deaths in the “Skid Row” area of Vancouver. Cast of 11 women and 2 men.
The Ventriloquist
Theatre of innovation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
The Vic
The Vic creates an ensemble of eight ethnically diverse women ranging in age from their teens to their fifties, each of them eager to claim the entitlement they feel their status as victim has “naturally” conferred upon them. Cast of 8 women.
The Weekend Healer
The disappearance of a young man acts as a catalyst for a drama that questions the nature of family and “traditional values.” Cast of 2 women and 1 man.
Tiln & Other Plays
By Michael Cook
Three short plays by Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.
Toronto, Mississippi
By Joan MacLeod
Drawing from MacLeod’s experience working with mentally handicapped adults and children, this play celebrates the personal challenges of both self-destruction and self-affirmation so vital to the process of identity creation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Twenty Years at Play
This collection of eight of the finest plays produced by Vancouver’s New Play Centre marks the company’s 20th year.
Two Plays
This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile: The Island of Demons and Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted.
Unity (1918)
By Kevin Kerr
In the fall of 1918, a world ravaged by four years of war was suddenly hit by a mysterious and deadly plague. As fear of the dreaded “Spanish” flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. Cast of 6 women and 3 men.
Vigil
An extremely self-centred and shallow person finds himself, through his own errors and inattentiveness, in a life-and-death situation. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
Waiting for the Parade
By John Murrell
Waiting for the Parade is set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Cast of 5 women.
Walsh
A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. Cast of 3 women and 11 men.
Wanted
By Sally Clark
Set during the Klondike gold rush, Wanted is a celebration of one woman’s determination to triumph over all who seek to possess her in a harsh social climate of chaos, opportunism, raw desire, greed and lust. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
Warriors
Warriors enters the world of advertising where even if the product is war, it is still a product that can be sold. Cast of 2 men.
WASPS
By Sally Clark
A play about the elements of our constructed tribal identities: incest, fashion, fetishism, style, populist art, amateur psychobabble and a fascination with the other. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Westray
By Chris O’Neill & Ken Schwatrz
Although the Westray mine is dangerously mismanaged, a young father descends under the ground again to support his family. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
Whale Riding Weather
A faded old man finds his life slipping away from him along with his young male lover, who meets a new, younger man. Cast of 3 men.
What Lies Before Us
Two–time Governor General’s Award–winning playwright Panych has turned Waiting for Godot into a comedy while simultaneously heightening the profound existential questions it asks. Cast of 3 men.
Where the Blood Mixes
By Kevin Loring
Can a person survive their past; can a people survive their history? Irreverently funny and brutally honest, this play about loss and redemption takes us to the bottom of a river, to the heart of a People. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.
Whereverville
On the evening of Loam Bay’s vote on resettlement, schoolteacher Abby Shea, herself “from away,” must struggle with her own phantom attachment to the community before casting her deciding vote. Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.
Willful Acts
An expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, War Babies and Commonwealth Games.
With Bated Breath
With Bated Breath is a poignant look at the disappearance of a shy, young gay man who leaves his community behind to start a new life in the big city. There, hopelessly awkward and naïve, caught in the cynical and brutalizing cash-economy of the city’s red light district, he retreats ever further into a world of fantasy and anonymity. Though his self-appointed, new-found, and worldly-wise mentor cautions him: “There’s nothing safe. We’re never safe. If you ever thought you were, you were in denial,” it’s too late for this dreamer who ignored the best advice he ever got from those who cared for him: “You just don’t find a soul mate—you have to invent them. Cuz love at first sight sure don’t last.”
Written on Water
A group of seniors struggles to rescue and rewrite their memories when torrential rains wash away all records of their past. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:
He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?
Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.
Friday August 20, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman
Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox
Tuesday August 17, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).
CURRENT FRONT LIST
Abraham Lincoln Goes to The Theatre
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Chantal Bilodeau
Drama
Beating the Bushes
Steven Bush
Drama
Imperial Canada Inc.
Alain Deneault
Translated by Fred A. Reed & Robin Philpot
Non-Fiction
Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews
Charles Olson
Edited by Ralph Maud
Non-Fiction
News: Postcards from Four Directions
Drew Hayden Taylor
Non-Fiction
Piercing
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Fiction
Subject To Change
Renee Rodin
Fiction
The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Artie Gold
Edited by Ken Norris & Endre Farkas
Poetry
The Edward Curtis Project
Marie Clements
Photographs by Rita Leistner
Drama
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Karen X. Tulchinsky
Fiction
The Madonna Painter
Michel Marc Bouchard
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Drama
The Refugee Hotel
Carmen Aguirre
Drama
The Satchmo' Suite
Hans Böggild & Doug Innis
Drama
time
bill bissett
Poetry
With Bated Breath
Bryden MacDonald
Drama
Copyright Talonbooks 1963-2010
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