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- July 2018
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Thursday July 19, 2018
An evening of film, poetry, and conversation (part 1) -
Saturday July 21, 2018
BC Books Prizes’ Gathering of Poets - Merecedes Eng, Rhonda Ganz, Jónína Kirton, Julie Paul, and Onjana Yawnghwe -
Saturday July 28, 2018
'An Awkward And Maybe Embarrassing Conversation About Difference' led by Sarah Garton Stanley & Marcus Youssef -
Saturday July 28, 2018
The Love Poetry Festival -
Tuesday July 31, 2018
#postdildo #readinggroup Session 4 - August 2018
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Tuesday August 7, 2018
#postdildo #readinggroup Session 5 - September 2018
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Wednesday September 19, 2018
Play: “Mom's the Word” in Saskatoon - November 2018
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Thursday November 1, 2018
Joshua Whitehead at Wordstock Sudbury -
Tuesday November 20, 2018
Play: “Cottagers and Indians” in Kingston - February 2019
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Wednesday February 27, 2019
Play: “Gracie” in Regina - March 2019
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Tuesday March 19, 2019
Play: “The Shoplifters” in Montreal -
Wednesday March 27, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Saskatoon - April 2019
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Thursday April 25, 2019
Play: “Empire of the Son” in Kamloops
(Post) Mistress, The
Canada’s most famous Aboriginal playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.
1 Hour Photo
From growing up in a fishing village on the banks of the Fraser River in British Columbia, to being confined at a Japanese Canadian internment camp during the Second World War, to helping build the Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic during the height of the Cold War, 1 Hour Photo ’s Mas Yamamoto is a grand theatrical persona, his life saturated with the most vivid colours of our times.
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.
![[cover of A Taste of Empire]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2622t.jpg)
A Taste of Empire
By Jovanni Sy
Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems.
“Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Recently Microsoft released the hit video game Maximo Cortés: Kitchen Gangsta. You’ve seen him on television. You’ve bought his bestselling cookbooks. Now for a limited engagement … it’s the Demon Chef, the Madman of the Kitchen, the Grand Master of Imperial Cuisine … Chef Maximo Cortés.”
The premise of the show is a once-in-a-lifetime cooking demonstration by Chef Maximo Cortés, the renowned inventor of his signature-style “Imperial Cuisine.” The audience excitedly awaits Chef Maximo’s arrival, relaxing with cocktails and complimentary hors d’oeuvres served to their seats. Suddenly their complacency is broken when Maximo’s amusing assistant, Jovanni, appears onstage. The celebrity chef in unavailable, but no worries: Jovanni, too, is an expert at preparing the traditional Filipino dish Rellenong Bangus (Stuffed Milkfish), and the audience follows along on a journey filled with humorous banter and a silky milkfish, sharp chef’s knife in Jovanni’s hand. As he cooks, he deconstructs the dish in humourous and surprising ways, serving up opinions on the European colonization of Asia, the state of modern agriculture, the ethics of food distribution and consumption – only a few of the ideas sampled in this engaging performance piece. When the actual fish dish is cooked and ready to eat, audience members are given tasting plates and even more food for thought. A Taste of Empire is truly a feast for the mind and palate. We call it “Iron Chef meets Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Bon appetit!
Cast of 1 man.
Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre
Mark Killman—a feared but much admired director—hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy in a re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of the target as a wax figure. Absurd, hilarious and haunting.
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.
Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, The
By Marcus Youssef & Guillermo Verdecchia & Camyar Chai
A hard-hitting and hilarious satire. Cast of 4 men.
After Class
In two new plays, Canada‘s king of black comedy takes on the failing education system. Both Parents Night and The Bigger Issue are set in public-school classrooms after hours and involve confrontations between stressed-out teachers and ticked-off parents.
Albertine in Five Times
The powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five times in her life. Cast of 6 women.
Albertine in Five Times – 2nd Edition
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.
Ali & Ali
By Camyar Chai & Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef
In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities.
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.
And Slowly Beauty
Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.
And So It Goes
Gwen and Ned lose their former middle-class lifestyle as they attempt to comprehend the murder of their schizophrenic daughter Karen, even seeking solace in the wry musings of the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut.
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
This perceptively poignant Governor General’s Award-nominated play by Siminovitch Prize Winner MacLeod involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to encounter, but is he the real threat to the elderly couple: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family—their home?
Art of Building a Bunker, The
By Adam Lazarus & Guillermo Verdecchia
The Art of Building a Bunker is a dark, viciously funny story recounting a week in the life of your average Elvis as he endures mandatory workplace sensitivity training.
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.
BASH'd
By Chris Craddock & Nathan Cuckow
While the goal of BASH’d is first and foremost to tell an engaging gay love story, it also flips the music industry’s gangsta stereotype of rap music on its head and returns it to its political roots—in this case to explore the dangers of the kind of attitudes that continue to condone and even encourage sexual discrimination of all kinds in our society. Not since Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a narrative poem inspired such empathy in the hearts and minds of its audience.
Beating the Bushes
By Steven Bush
Steven Bush is on a mission to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins occupy the White House? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” do to redeem the family name? This stand-up comedy, rant, political protest and call to action is a brash theatrical tour de force. Cast of 1 man.
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.
Berlin Blues, The
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.
Bethune
By Rod Langley
Rod Langley’s Bethune chronicles the medical and political career of Norman Bethune, a Canadian-born doctor who died a national hero in the Republic of China in 1939. He remains an esteemed figure in China today, for his selfless contributions to the Communist Party of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945), when he trained rural peasants to serve as army medics and set up much-needed base hospitals that ultimately saved thousands of lives.
Billy Bishop Goes to War
By John MacLachlan Gray & Eric Peterson
A musical about Canada’s famous World War I flying ace. Cast of 2 men.
Billy Bishop Goes to War - 2nd Edition
By John MacLachlan Gray & Eric Peterson
A musical about Canada’s famous World War I flying ace. Cast of 2 men.
Blue Box
In this sexy, fast-paced, and darkly comic follow-up to her acclaimed autobiography, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, Aguirre ultimately asks: Between the extremes of love for the political cause and love for another, how and where does one create space for self-love?
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.
Bolsheviki
Set in a hotel bar in Montreal on Remembrance Day, Bolsheviki has World War I veteran Harry “Rosie” Rollins telling young reporter Jerry Nines about his experience in the trenches. Rollins recalls men pissing their pants, losing limbs and planning a revolt against their officers. This cutting-edge drama, profoundly in opposition to conventional histories of Canadian troops in World War I, debunks every sentimental notion of duty, heroism and nationhood.
Bonjour, Là, Bonjour
A beloved brother returns to his family. Cast of 6 women and 2 men.
Book of Esther, The
“ The Book of Esther examines the seemingly irreconcilable positions of two groups: conservative rural Christians and militantly anti-religious urban queer activists. But Brodie doesn’t take sides. Instead, it’s like she’s picked up a rock to discover what’s scurrying around underneath, pointed it out to us, and said, “Isn’t this interesting. Maybe we should all look at this for a while. Maybe we should talk about it, instead of just pretending that it isn’t there.”
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.
Boy in The Treehouse, The / 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.
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.
Buz'Gem Blues, The
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.
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.
Carpenter, The
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.
Cerulean Blue
Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. The play was written for a large ensemble cast, which makes it ideal for musical theatre departments in high schools and colleges – every student can play a part. Cast of ten women and ten men.
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.
Christina, The Girl King
Michel Marc Bouchard’s latest play tells the story of Queen Christina of Sweden, who wreaked havoc throughout northern Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. An enigmatic monarch, a flamboyant and unpredictable intellectual, a woman eager for knowledge, and a feminist before her time, Christina reigned over an empire she hoped to make the most sophisticated in all of Europe.
Cold Comfort (DRAMA)
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.
Concise Köchel, The
A lifetime’s devotion to the music of Mozart conceals a gruesome secret. Cast of 4 women.
Consecrated Ground
By George Boyd
In Consecrated Ground, Nova Scotian playwright George Boyd retells the struggle of Africville’s residents to save their homes and their dignity. With tremendous wit and gravity, George Boyd takes us back to Africville on the verge of extinction, making us a gift of characters believable in their vulnerabilities, their courage and their outrage.
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.
Coronation Voyage, The
Will a Montreal Mafioso sacrifice his young son for safe conduct to England? Cast of 6 women and 8 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.
![[cover of Crees in the Caribbean]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2621t.jpg)
Crees in the Caribbean
A heartwarming comedy about two middle-aged First Nations elders, Evie and Cecil, on their very first trip out of the country.
CECIL: So, what exactly are we going to do now that we’re here in Mexico?EVIE: I’m so glad you asked. Supposedly there are some ancient Mayan ruins somewhere in the interior, not far from here. I thought that might be interesting.
CECIL: If you want to look at an ancient, broken-down, Indian ruin, we can go visit
your cousin.
Evie and Cecil are celebrating their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As a gift, their grown children send them on a second honeymoon – to a fabulous resort on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. The only problem is that neither have ever been out of the country, let alone off their Cree reservation. Each reacts to their new experiences differently, and something ominous seems to be bothering Cecil. Despite the sun, sand, and sea sparkling right outside the resort window, all Cecil seems to want to do is sit alone in his hotel room, idly flipping through TV channels, the curtains pulled tight. What is he worried about? Maybe there is more behind this trip than he has been told. The past, present, and future all pay the couple a visit as they acclimatize to the pleasures of Mexico – and
spicy food. Mixed up in all the fun is their hotel housekeeper, Manuela. As they form a bond with this courteous young local, they help her navigate some of the troublesome situations in which she finds herself.
Cast of 1 man and 2 women.
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.
![[cover of Cyrano de Bergerac, new-format reprint]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2667t.jpg)
Cyrano de Bergerac [new]
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.
Daisy
By Sean Devine
Based on true events, Daisy is a political drama that presents the moment in TV history that ushered in the age of negative advertising and fundamentally changed how we elect our leaders.
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.
Dead Metaphor
Canada’s top playwright sears the page with three new darkly comic plays that denounce political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity.
The title play, Dead Metaphor, examines the collision of a politician’s personal and professional lives, complicated by a son’s return from Afghanistan.
In The Ravine, a mayoral candidate earns that his ex-wife is living in a gully nearby and wants to put a hit on him.
The Burden of Self-Awareness has money at the centre of a dramatic conflict of values.
Each of the three plays is populated by characters trying to navigate the increasingly blurred lines of what’s right and wrong – trying to always stay informed, alert, and ready to act for the common good. Or just to get even.
Dead White Writer on the Floor
Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics.
Death of René Lévesque, The
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.
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.
Dishwashers, The
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.
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.
Driving Force, The
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.
Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept, The
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.
Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge, The
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.
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.
East End Plays: Part 1, The
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.
East End Plays: Part 2, The
Contains Beautiful City, Love and Anger and Tough.
Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The
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.
Edward Curtis Project, The
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.
![[cover of Empire of the Son]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2619t.jpg)
Empire of the Son
Empire of the Son is an original one-hander that blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines and continents. It is a unique theatrical hybrid that combines cinematography with the raw immediacy of a performance piece intimately connected to real life in real time. Through a series of audio interviews, playwright Tetsuro Shigetmatsu discovers vast worlds contained within his emotionally remote father – from the ashes of World War II and Hiroshima to swinging London in the 1960s and work in broadcasting at the BBC. As the playwright learns about how his own father was once a son, he realizes all the ways in which he himself needs to step up and become a better dad. This funny, poignant story of one immigrant family and their intergenerational conflicts reminds us
that no matter how far we journey out into the world to find ourselves – across decades and continents – we never stop being our parents’ children. It is the story of two generations of CBC broadcasters and the radio silence between them. The 2016 remount in Vancouver completely sold out, and Empire of the Son is currently touring across Canada.
Cast of 1 man
Read excerpts from Empire of the Son on Meta-Talon.
En Pièces Détachées
The life of a lower-class family in East End Montreal. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.
Ends of the Earth, The
Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cast of 2 women and 3 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.
Execution, The
Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.
Fairies Are Thirsty, The
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.
![[False Starts cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2536t.jpg)
False Starts
False Starts presents a series of determining moments between two people stuck reliving the same scene over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation).
Faraway Nearby, The
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.
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.
Forward
Forward is about climate change. It’s a story about how an Arctic explorer unwittingly opened up the Arctic for development. A story about people having good intentions that led to unintended consequences. A story about who we are in all our glorious imperfection. But Forward is also a story of hope.
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.
Fronteras Americanas - 2nd Edition
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.
Glace Bay Miners' Museum, The
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.
God and the Indian
While panhandling outside a coffee shop, Johnny, a Cree woman who lives on the streets, is shocked to recognize a face from her childhood, which was spent in a residential school. Desperate to hear the man acknowledge the terrible abuse he inflicted on her and other children at the school, Johnny follows Anglican bishop George King to his office to confront him, but is the bishop actually guilty of what she claims, or has her ability to recollect been altered by poverty, abuse, and starvation experienced on the streets? Can her memories be trusted? Who is responsible for what? At its core, God and the Indian, by celebrated Aboriginal playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, explores the complex process of healing through dialogue.
Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
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.
Gordon
Gordon and his former cellmate, Carl, break into Gordon’s family home, wherein they confront some very disturbing metaphors. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.
![[Gracie cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2747t.jpg)
Gracie
By Joan MacLeod
Gracie is a dramatic monologue telling the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States.
Great Wave Of Civilization, The
The destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Alberta and Montana. Cast of 5 women and 13 men.
Gull, The
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.
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.
Heretic, The
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.
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.
Hope Slide / Little Sister, The
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.
Hosanna – 3rd Edition
In Michel Tremblay’s classic play about identity in crisis, Claude leaves the conformity of small-town Quebec to realize a new life and a new persona among the drag queens and prostitutes of Montreal’s seedy “Main.”
Impromptu of Outremont, The
Three sisters have an “impromptu” and re-examine their personal and social problems. Cast of 4 women.
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.
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In a Blue Moon
When Frankie’s dad dies, her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave.
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 Absentia
Four seasons after her husband’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally motionless, isolated in a country cottage, waiting for word, or perhaps even more significantly, a connection. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She emerges to give him her husband’s parka – strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.
In Piazza San Domenico
A comedy of errors, this two-act play recounts the story of how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective love lives in different ways. And there’s gossip. And an earthquake.
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.
Inside the Seed
Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script, Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.
Jabber
High school, like no other social space, throws together people of all histories and backgrounds, and young people must decide what they believe in and how far they are willing to go to defend their beliefs. Jabber does its part to challenge appearances – and the judgments people make based on those appearances.
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.
Just, The
By Albert Camus
Camus’s The Just (Les Justes) is a five-act play based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. Bobby Theodore’s fresh, modern translation enhances the contemporaneity of the play.
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King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties
By Niall McNeil & Marcus Youssef
Among the first by a writer with Down syndrome, these two plays demonstrate an ability to riff and shift perspective, with disarming, hilarious, and occasionally heart-stopping results. Based on the iconic stories of King Arthur and Peter Pan, they are modern-day mash-ups that meld the fictional, the meta-fictional, and the real in ways that are counter-intuitive and absurd. And they’re musical!
King of Thieves
At its heart, King of Thieves, like both its predecessors, is an examination of criminal behaviour at all levels of society, and of the disturbing truth that everyone can fall prey to dishonesty and corruption. But the element of fun in Walker’s script makes us laugh and his sense of zaniness reflects the bafflement many of us feel when contemplating our own world: a place where men of dubious moral integrity still inhabit the corridors of power and are still not taken to task for their dishonourable – if not downright criminal – behaviour.
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.
Lady Smith, The
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.
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.
Leave of Absence
A small prairie community is blown apart when an audacious teenaged girl challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. Suspected of being gay, she is brutalized by her classmates. This searing drama of bigotry and transcendence challenges the fallout of the Catholic Church’s response to the same-sex marriage rulings in Canada. Cast of 2 men and 3 women.
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.
Leisure Society, The
A dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
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 & Ken Dryden
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
Three musicals by John MacLachlan 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.
Madonna Painter, The
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.
Magnificent Voyage of Emily Carr, The
Marchessault evokes the doubts, the trials and the joys of this singular existence. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.
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.
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Messenger
By Wendy Lill
As in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, two brothers struggle for power and ideals each believes are right. Messenger takes place in another country, Canada, and in another century but tackles similar themes. A timely play in terms of environmental issues, full of lots of great political dirty tricks.
Michel and Ti-Jean
In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean.
Miss Julie
By August Strindberg & 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. I – 5th Edition
This fifth edition contains The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Les Belles Soeurs, Leaving Home, Sticks and Stones (The Donnellys, Part One), Zastrozzi, Billy Bishop Goes to War, Balconville, Blood Relations, Drag Queens on Trial, Bordertown Café, Toronto, Mississippi, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Lion in the Streets, and Life Without Instruction.
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.
Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. II – 5th Edition
Modern Canadian Plays is the core text for university-level Canadian drama courses around the world. Now in its fifth edition, with the previous edition published in 2002, the two-volume Modern Canadian Plays drama series anthologizes major Canadian plays written and performed since 1967. The second volume presents a range of exciting Canadian plays from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Mom's the Word
By Linda A. Carson & Jill Daum & Barbara Pollard
Humorous stories, bittersweet monologues, poetic reflections and revelatory anecdotes about motherhood.
Moo
By Sally Clark
When the feisty and rebellious Moragh (Moo) MacDowell meets the intriguing Harry Parker, she decides nothing will ever separate them … and Harry has been running ever since. Moo is an unconventionally comedy of love and obsession. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.
Moss Park and Tough!
Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people.
Motherhouse
From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.
My TWP Plays
By Jack Winter
My TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence, contradictions, and subversion of the social revolution during which they were written and first produced, as well as the cultural politics at a time when Canadian artists were investigating new, noncolonial, and distinctly Canadian forms of expression that would define the nation and challenge received artistic styles and practices.
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Nine Dragons
By Jovanni Sy
Set in 1920s Hong Kong, Nine Dragons is a hard-boiled detective fiction with a twist: an inquisition into colonialism, racism, assimilation, and the clash of cultures. It’s the classic mystery/detective genre overlaid with the topical issue of identity – a struggle that any person of colour faces in any society that privileges whiteness.
Noam Chomsky Lectures, The
By Daniel Brooks & Guillermo Verdecchia
An innovative, multi-layered deconstruction of mass media and politics. Cast of 2 men.
Nothing to Lose
Working-class survivors of the ’60s stage a workers’ sit-down strike. Cast of 9 men.
Occupation of Heather Rose, The
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.
Odd Ducks
Welcome to the small town of Tartan Cross, Nova Scotia, where skeletons rattle in closets and past histories are so intertwined that the lives of four forty-something, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright Bryden MacDonald positions his four characters at the brink of existential angst – and the action unfolds from there.
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.
Paradise Garden
After generations of living in the paradise of their west coast family estate, the McKinnons have fallen on hard times—half of it has just been bought by a Turkish immigrant family. The heirs of both families, Day McKinnon and Leyla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, alienated by their ancestors’ “outdated” traditions. Yet Leyla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old estate garden, and Day has uncovered an ancient family secret there. Abandoning their families for their careers, Day and Leyla are reunited years later, having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but a paradise that we must build and tend by hand: like a garden in the wilderness of our lives.
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.
Power Plays, The
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.
Queens, The
The shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre. Cast of 6 women.
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.
Real World? , The
In The Real World?, Michel Tremblay returns to the very source of creative work, that notorious first play which supposedly contains the scenes of everything yet to come. And ultimately, he finds “himself” confronted with the same fundamental question over time. Did he have the right? Does he still have the right?
Cast of 4 women and 3 men.
Refugee Hotel, The
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.
Remember Me
Two ex-lovers meet and compare and confess their fears and disillusionments. Cast of 2 men.
Riddle of the World, The
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.
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.
Satchmo' Suite, The
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.
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.
Seagull, The
A revitalization of a Russian theatre classic. Cast of 5 women and 8 men.
Seeds
Seeds is part courtroom drama and part social satire about the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada showdown between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and biotech company Monsanto Inc. In question is the legitimacy of patenting genetically modified food crops. The play takes us back to the seminal moment when a single farmer stood up to international agribusiness and almost won.
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Sextet
A dark and steamy comedy that explores the harmonies and dysfunctions of six sexually entangled musicians on an ill-fated winter tour. When a blizzard strands this sextet for an extra night, they have only their instruments, each other, and their secrets to keep them warm.
Shape of a Girl , The / 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.
Sila
In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).
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.
Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion
Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion is a powerful satire, a creative debate about the past violences of colonial racism and the as yet untested potentiality of restoring harmony between Peoples in Canada.
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.
Spectacle of Empire
Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script, two English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and an extensive historical and critical introduction.
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
The stop-motion sequences of pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured the moving body on film for the first time and laid the foundation for modern cinema. Kevin Kerr vividly dramatizes this technological breakthrough in this multimedia drama.
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.
Tale of Teeka, The
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.
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Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever
By Marie Clements & Nelson Gray
The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with transformation as a key theme.
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.
Tear the Curtain!
By Jonathon Young & Kevin Kerr & Kim Collier
Tear the Curtain! is a psychological thriller set in a fictionalized 1930s Vancouver. The play explores global issues that consider what we want from art: to be shocked and surprised or for order to be restored.
Thanks for Giving
By Kevin Loring
Nan’s family is home for Thanksgiving, but some unsolicited truths are about to be dropped at the dinner table. Old wounds and new realities collide, and sibling rivalry is stoked, but the enduring spirit that guides this family charges on, ever fierce. Thanks for Giving offers plenty to chew on.
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.
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The Cure for Death by Lightning
By Daryl Cloran
Cloran’s play is the stage adaptation of the award-winning novel by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. Set in Turtle Valley (near Kamloops, British Columbia) in the shadow of the Second World War, The Cure for Death by Lightning tells a dark, challenging story that includes sexual abuse, grief, and the day-to-day struggle for survival.
The Divine
Quebec City, 1905. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a cease-and-desist letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, “the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid.”
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The Envelope
Drawn from his own experiences, Vittorio Rossi’s new comedy-drama exposes the bureaucratic institution that is the Canadian film industry, and we follow the character Michael Moretti, a veteran playwright, as he struggles to get his new play, Romeo’s Rise, turned into a movie.
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 Mystery Play
The Mystery Play, a supernatural chiller of rattling cupboards, overnight séances, and spectral possessions, reveals a new definition of “mystery” – one derived from the Mystery Plays of sister Salter’s dwindling faith – in which the word can also mean a miracle beyond all logic.
The Shoplifters
With its cast of oddball characters, Panych’s comedy offers biting observations about society’s haves and have-nots and how much they might actually have in common.
Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
The St. Leonard Chronicles
From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. The couple’s newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo – not just a cultural infraction, but also an ominous sign that all is not as it should be. Eager to break free of family ties that are bound too tight, Terry and Robert announce they’re moving to the affluent anglophone suburb of Beaconsfield – tantamount to committing a mortal sin in the eyes of their more traditional Italian relatives. When they confess their plans to their parents over dinner one night, floodgates open to other unspoken desires and revelations, turning conservative St. Leonard values upside down.
The St. Leonard Chronicles opened the 2013–14 season at Montreal’s venerable Centaur Theatre and sold out before its run. The play was extended and went on to sell more than twenty thousand tickets. The French version of the Chronicles, translated by Galluccio himself, premiered at Theâtre Jean Duceppe in Montreal in December 2014 and will embark in 2015 on a twenty-four-city tour.
Cast of 4 women and 3 men.
Read a scene from The St. Leonard Chronicles on Meta-Talon.
The Valley
By Joan MacLeod
Inspired by an event in British Columbia that shattered the public’s confidence in the police – the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski during his arrest at the Vancouver airport – The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. In addressing this fraught relationship, award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod empathizes with both parties, each of whom is guided by good intentions but equally challenged by their own
cultural biases and flawed humanity.
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 Watershed cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2455t.jpg)
The Watershed
Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the playwright, The Watershed brings to the stage a multiplicity of ideological perspectives and conflicting visions for Canada’s natural resources, and its characters speak the words of real Canadians from all across the political spectrum. Policy is anything but dry in The Watershed; in fact, it holds startling implications for our national identity and future.
Tiln & Other Plays
By Michael Cook
Three short plays by Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.
Tom at the Farm
Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis – neither of whom know Tom even exists.
Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
Three sisters and their mother are forced by the American government to relocate from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. As these four women try to re-establish connections to a new land, they each find themselves lost. Inspired by true events, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian is a poetic excavation of the lost stories of displaced Aboriginal people.
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.
Trespassers, The
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.”
Trial of Judith K. , The
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.
Trigger, The
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.
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.
Unnatural and Accidental Women, The
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.
Ventriloquist, The
Theatre of innovation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Vigil - 2nd Edition
Vigil is about a man returning—after thirty years—to sit with a female relative on her deathbed. Kemp, the protagonist, is an extremely self-centred and shallow person who uses acid wit and seemingly callous indifference to cover up the profound discomfort he experiences upon finding himself part of a death watch. Kemp’s problem is: she’s not dying fast enough. Gallows humour and Kemp’s diatribes on humanity and mortality fuel this delightfully dark narrative, but it is Grace’s economical contributions to the dialogue (she’s a woman of few words) that give this play its weight and profundity.
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.
War Cantata / Child Object
How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? Larry Tremblay’s latest play, War Cantata, looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next.
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.
![[We the Family cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2456t.jpg)
We the Family
Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed.
Weekend Healer, The
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.
Westray
By Chris O’Neill & Ken Schwartz
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.
Winners and Losers
By Marcus Youssef & James Long
Two buddies, theatre artists and long-time friends Marcus and James, sit at a table and pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things – Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs – and debate whether they are successful or not; in other words, whether they are winners or losers. Each friend seeks to defeat the other, and because one of these men grew up economically privileged, and the other did not, the competition very quickly adds up.
Winners and Losers showcases the work of two giants of the Vancouver indie theatre scene. James Long’s Theatre Replacement develops work specific to particular places and the people who live in them. Marcus Youssef’s Neworld Theatre investigates questions of power, culture, and belonging.
Their first collaborative work is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.
Cast of 2 men.
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.
![[You Will Remember Me cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2534t.jpg)
You Will Remember Me
Memory – personal, familial, and societal – is the central theme of this new play by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright François Archambault. Translated by Bobby Theodore, this work follows a family’s struggle with dementia.
![[Yours Forever, Marie-Lou cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2535t.jpg)
Yours Forever, Marie-Lou
In Linda Gaboriau’s new translation of this classic Michel Tremblay play, two sisters confront the memory of their parents’ death – and other long-buried memories and points of tension.
Book Recs for International Women’s Day 2018
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we asked our staff to recommend favourite Talon books that they felt contributed to the advancement of women and to the feminist literary canon.
Tuesday February 6, 2018 in Meta-Talon
“Argument is to me the air I breathe”
By Carl Peters
On Meta-Talon today, please enjoy the full text of the presentation given by Carl Peters at the Modern Languages Association convention in New York City on January 7, 2018. This talk responds to the question posed in the MLA convention session Rhetoric in Post-Factual Times: how to perform textual analysis in a time when facts are no longer the marker of good argumentation. (Peters’s talk is also related to his work on Stein; Peters is recently the author of Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.)
Thursday December 21, 2017 in Meta-Talon
Our little end-of-year present to you is a miniature from M.A.C. Farrant’s delightful collection of very short stories, The World Afloat. Happy Holidays from Talonbooks!
Our Spiritual Lives
We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists. And we know that dried seaweed can save the Douglas fir from extinction so we hang dried seaweed from the tree’s branches.
Tuesday December 5, 2017 in Meta-TalonA new cover for Drew Hayden Taylor’s play, In a World Created by a Drunken God
A finalist for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, In a World Created by a Drunken God has been in steady demand since it was first published 11 years ago. From 2006 until the end of 2017, In a World Created by a Drunken God was in print with its original cover, which showed moving boxes and a flip phone. Now, Talonbooks has reprinted In a World Created by a Drunken God for the fourth time, and it wears a dynamic, new cover …
Specials
There are no specials at this time.
Current Catalogues
![[image: Talonbooks 2018 Fall catalogue]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2797.jpg)
Fall 2018 Catalogue PDF
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2018 Indigenous Catalogue PDF
CURRENT FRONT LIST
1 Hour Photo
Tetsuro Shigematsu
Drama
Almost Islands
Stephen Collis
Non-Fiction
Around Her
Sophie Bienvenu
Translated by Rhonda Mullins
Non-Fiction
beholden
Fred Wah & Rita Wong
Poetry
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Checking In
Adeena Karasick
Poetry
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Duets
Edward Byrne
Poetry
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Finding Mr. Wong
Susan Crean
Non-Fiction
Flow
Roy Miki
Edited by Michael Barnholden
Poetry
![[Gracie cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2747.jpg)
Gracie
Joan MacLeod
Introduction by Marita Dachsel
Drama
He Speaks Volumes
Rebecca Wigod
Non-Fiction
![[King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2748.jpg)
King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties
Niall McNeil & Marcus Youssef
Introduction by Al Etmanski
Drama
![[Kuei, My Friend cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2741.jpg)
Kuei, My Friend
Deni Ellis Béchard & Natasha Kanapé Fontaine
Translated by Deni Ellis Béchard & Howard Scott
Non-Fiction
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Mercenary English – 3rd edition
Mercedes Eng
Frontlist
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Nine Dragons
Jovanni Sy
Drama
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Safety Sand
Garry Thomas Morse
Poetry
Seven Sacred Truths
Wanda John-Kehewin
Poetry
Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion
Drew Hayden Taylor
Drama
![[Talker's Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2746.jpg)
Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever
Marie Clements & Nelson Gray
Drama
Thanks for Giving
Kevin Loring
Drama
![[The Cure for Death by Lightning cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2750.jpg)
The Cure for Death by Lightning
Daryl Cloran
Drama
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The Eyelash and the Monochrome
Tiziana La Melia
Poetry
![[The Green Chamber cover]](http://talonbooks.com/images/2742.jpg)
The Green Chamber
Martine Desjardins
Translated by Fred A. Reed & David Homel
Fiction
The Mystery Play
Josh MacDonald
Drama
Treaty 6 Deixis
Christine Stewart
Poetry
White
Deni Ellis Béchard
Fiction
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