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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.

By David French
Newfoundland joins Confederation in the continuing saga of the Mercer family. Cast of 6 women, 6 men and 2 male children.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five times in her life. Cast of 6 women.

By Wendy Lill
A play about modern day witch-hunting. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The English and French working class get together on their balconies in Montreal. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

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.

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.

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 stand-up 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.

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.

By Rod Langley
A study of how one man’s vision may shape the world. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

By John Gray
A musical about Canada’s famous World War I flying ace. Cast of 2 men.

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.

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.

A beloved brother returns to his family. Cast of 6 women and 2 men.

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.

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.

A search for sanctuary in an Ontario insane asylum in 1938. Cast of 7 women and 4 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By James Reaney
A mosaic of experiences that form a childhood. Cast of 2 women, 2 men, 1 female child and 1 male child.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Written by one of Canada’s most influential postmodern playwrights, this dazzling one-man show is storytelling of the highest order.

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.

Two interweaving monologues on the sacred and the profane. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The life of a lower-class family in East End Montreal. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

Tremblay’s penetrating analysis of a Quebec family unit. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

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.

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.

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

By George Ryga
This collection includes Hungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk.

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.

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.

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 was always an odd little child, given his penchant for setting the neighbours’ sheds on fire with their pets locked inside, and his fascination with the funeral rituals at the church across the way. Home-schooled in the evenings within the bounds of a somewhat limited curriculum of drunken impromptu kitchen renovations and wife beatings in the resultant ruins by his father Gord, a man of troglodyte imagination and boundless determination for self-replication, his namesake son dedicates himself to these subjects with a kind of limitless and inarticulate awe. Something sinister and permanent involving the stairs to the basement seems to have happened to Gordon’s mother at a formative stage of his development, narrowing the scope of his education even further and leaving him at somewhat Oedipal loose ends.

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.

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.

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.

By Gail Scott
A woman tries to negotiate her personal passage from Quebec’s politically turbulent ’70s to the threatening bleakness of the ’80s.

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.

A play about illusions. Cast of 2 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Michael Cook
A Maritime family’s tragedy, set in a raging storm. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.

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.

By David French
A sophisticated backstage comedy. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

Desperately poor immigrants find refuge with Montreal’s legendary barkeep, Joe Beef. Cast of 5 women and 5 men.

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.

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. Cast of 3 women, 4 men and 1 male child.

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.

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.

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.

By Rick Salutin
A play about Quebec and Canada using hockey as a metaphor. Cast of 7 men.

By Sally Clark
A woman’s struggle for freedom, identity and dignity. Cast of 3 women and 5 men.

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.

By John Gray
Three musicals by John Gray: 18 Wheels, Rock and Roll and Don Messer’s Jubilee.

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, 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.

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.

How our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt us in adult life. Cast of 4 women and 1 adolescent male.

Includes screenplay and stage play. Cast of 3 women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Linda A. Carson & Jill Daum & Alison Kelly
Humorous stories, bittersweet monologues, poetic reflections and revelatory anecdotes about motherhood.

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.

Working-class survivors of the ’60s stage a workers’ sit-down strike. Cast of 9 men.

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 Christmas Eve the workers in a Montreal shipping room get drunk and go on strike. Cast of 8 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A mordant satire on the relation between theatre and life. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

Hadfield traces the process of creating a theatrical “success” and investigates how the politics involved influences what we perceive as “good” playwriting.

Two ex-lovers meet and compare and confess their fears and disillusionments. Cast of 2 men.

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.

Four Quebec women writers meet at the centre of a fabulous vortex. Cast of 4 women.

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.

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.

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.

By David French
The third book of the Mercer family saga. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

By Kevin Kerr
Adultery, jealousy, murder and an abandoned child haunt the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Cast of 5 women and 7 men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Marcus Youssef & Guillermo Verdecchia & Camyar Chai
A hard-hitting and hilarious satire. Cast of 4 men.

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 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.”

Two plays about the process of children becoming adults and the nature of, and necessity for, rites of passage in all cultures.

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.

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.

A lifetime’s devotion to the music of Mozart conceals a gruesome secret. Cast of 4 women.

Will a Montreal Mafioso sacrifice his young son for safe conduct to England? Cast of 6 women and 8 men.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Contains Beautiful City, Love and Anger and Tough.

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.

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.

Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.

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.

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.

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.

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 destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Alberta and Montana. Cast of 5 women and 13 men.

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.

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.

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.

Three sisters have an “impromptu” and re-examine their personal and social problems. Cast of 4 women.

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.

A dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

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.

Marchessault evokes the doubts, the trials and the joys of this singular existence. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

By Daniel Brooks & Guillermo Verdecchia
An innovative, multi-layered deconstruction of mass media and politics. Cast of 2 men.

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.

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 shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre. Cast of 6 women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A revitalization of a Russian theatre classic. Cast of 5 women and 8 men.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Theatre of innovation. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

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 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.

By Michael Cook
Three short plays by Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.

Clements’s play is a compelling, and poetic, investigation of the coldly bureaucratic machinations that have, throughout history, attempted to facilitate the disappearance of Native people. Though Tombs of the Vanishing Indian focuses on specific policies and locations, it speaks eloquently to broader themes of Aboriginal displacement. There are, indeed, echoes of Canadian policy aimed at the dissolution of First Nations families and culture: the potlatch ban, residential schools and the ban on Native language, whose profoundly damaging ramifications are our shared legacy.

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.

This collection of eight of the finest plays produced by Vancouver’s New Play Centre marks the company’s 20th year.

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile: The Island of Demons and Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

Thursday February 2, 2012 in Meta-Talon
How to Bank Your Life on Speculative "Futures"
Jonathan Ball interviews Garry Thomas Morse about various speculative “futures”:
In two volumes of The Chaos! Quincunx, I use what William S. Burroughs called the “fold-in” method, which feels rather like battering some batter in a bowl. This process is exciting, because of its sense of immediacy. I’m never quite sure what the characters are going to do next!
Thursday January 26, 2012 in Meta-Talon
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again Comes to Kamloops
Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again comes to Kamloops:
They may seem like everyday moments — and in many ways they are — but, with Lorne Cardinal and Margo Kane playing the only two characters, the play becomes “an homage to his mother,” Leyshon said.
Monday January 23, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Anis Shivani Interviews Michael McClure
Anis Shivani interviewed Beat Poet Michael McClure On Jim Morrison, The Doors, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac for The Huffington Post on March 03, 2011:
Shivani: Is Olson the major figure in American poetry after Pound?
McClure: I do not like seeing poetry as literature rather than art and I’m not happy with the separation of Poetry and the sister arts, I prefer to see Art as Art. I perceive that a major figure after Pound would be Jackson Pollock, and instead of looking at “American” Poetry as William Carlos Williams exhorted all to do, I would look worldwide at the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and of course Charles Olson, and all.
Thursday January 12, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Direct Harkening: A Review of On the Material
Andrew Vaisius reviews 2011 BC Book Prize Winner On the Material:
This poetry burns straight into your thoughts with a third degree of truth. Words matter. They aren’t frilly or sentimental, hoity-toity or academic. Collis writes in a language unencumbered by tired cliché or overwrought descriptions. His is a direct harkening, devoid of affectation, expressing the gut endurance of each sparking woman/man capable of the “natural brilliance of the human spirit.”
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