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David Frenchs adaptation of August Strindbergs disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the counts man-servant has an eerie contemporary feel about it. French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original scenes of desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission, and deceit. Cast of 2 women and 1 man.

Drawing from MacLeods 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. At the plays heart is Jhana, whose character begs the question whether the other characters, in their own ways, are any less handicapped. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

The perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama: Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, tells his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Nino, Angelos lover, is betrayed and mortified by Angelos coming out but is not unprepared for his own mothers melodramatic reaction. Cast: 4 women, 3 men.

Six plays, united only by the fact that they take place in one and the same suburban motel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta, and The End of Civilization. Transients, lovers, the haunted, the hunted, the desperate, the dumb, each strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.

Pocahontas, Tonto, Injun Joe, and other First Nations characters discover they are characters and attempt to rewrite their stereotyped roles.Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions theatre of the absurd and mystery novels to create one of the funniest and most thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics.Cast of 5 men and 1 woman.

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant only one of them, the fat woman, is bearing a child of true love and affection.In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay provides a divine comedy of triumphs and tragedies.

Two grown sisters confront the memory of their parents tragic death.This revised edition of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, which played at the 1990 Stratford Festival, is John Van Burek and Bill Glasscos translation of Michel Tremblays original French text.Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

In 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, a troubled Canadian soldier and a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer meet in the Qatari desert and become unlikely and secret friends. But the tenuous friendship is severed after a horrifying act inside the Canadian base.This play rips the mask off recent western peacekeeping operations and challenges Canadas long-treasured myths. Cast of 3 to 5 men.

Sexy, provocative, and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. A single actress alternately narrates and enacts her own and her familys history along with an uninvited narrator/actor, Amante (lover in Italian). We are never sure whether Rosa has created Amante or he has created her. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is Tremblays homage to his mother, who nurtured his imagination, his reclusive reading habits and his love for the theatre and the arts, yet who did not live to witness the performance of Les Belles Soeursthe first successful play written in joual with which Tremblay legitimized the Quebecois vernacular in the artsand the world-wide acclaim for her sons artistic genius. In a compelling balance of humour and poignancy, Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together, culminating in his reassurance of his dying mothers concern for him immediately prior to his spectacular success.

Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rmi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and Africa in the company of the dangerous and blonde Raa, Rmis former mistress. Meanwhile, Rmi remodels a ramshackle house in rural Quebec, designed for Mammy, if she ever comes back, in flesh and bed. The novel is the journal that he keeps during their parallel journeys.Ducharmes writing, which has contributed to the recasting of the literary canon of Quebec, is full of echoes, juxtapositions and double meanings. With the likes of Marie-Claire Blais, Jacques Godbout and Michel Tremblay, Rjean Ducharme is one of the select qubcois fiction writers who have contributed to the transformation of qubcois letters since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebecs North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, a local fisherman. Rose is finally tracked down in Montreal, where she lives a solitary life fogged by one of the inevitabilities of old age failing memory.Dorothea (the name Rose gives the young filmmaker), takes her back to scenes from her childhood and invites her to tell her story as they go, and so we return to a past assembled from Roses fragmented recollections.Structured as a series of short cinematic takes, this novel about recovering both personal and shared histories is told in a polyphony of voices, including Rose herself (as a child, an adolescent, and in her old age), the sexton of the village church, his three female cousins, an elderly neighbour, a villager who passes time on the harbour wall, and Roses long-deceased mother. We see fishermen on the docks with their nets, hard-at-work villagers with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, leafy gardens, and tree-lined streets, all recreated during Roses reminiscences. The problem is that many of these scenes are invented, not real. Does that matter? Or are the stories we tell more important?

In this riotously funny new comedy from Morris Panych, we meet Alma, a seasoned career shoplifter who prefers the five-finger discount over some lousy seniors day deal. But its not just an empty wallet that leads Alma to a life of petty crime its also her strong convictions about social justice and economic inequality.Along for the ride is Phyllis, Almas frazzled accomplice who lacks her mentors cool demeanour and snappy comebacks. Its Alma who does the talking when the pair is apprehended at the grocery store by Dom, an overzealous rookie security guard. Guided by the strictness of his born-again Christian belief, Dom is ready to handcuff the culprits and call the police, but his affable senior partner, Otto, intervenes with a more sympathetic view of the crime: Its just a couple a steaks. As Alma, Phyllis, Dom, and Otto share their wildly different takes on the situation, complex views on morality and ethics begin to emerge.With its cast of oddball characters, Panychs comedy offers biting observations about societys haves and have-nots and how much they might actually have in common.Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Canadas 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 politicians personal and professional lives, complicated by a sons return from Afghanistan. In The Ravine, a mayoral candidate learns 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 whats right and wrong trying to always stay informed, alert, and ready to act for the common good. Or just to get even.

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 couples 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 theyre 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 201314 season at Montreals 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, premieres at Thetre Jean Duceppe in Montreal in December 2014 and then in 2015 embarks on a twenty-four-city tour.Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

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. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and theyre left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter, there is conflict within the band and the sudden appearance of an old girlfriend makes the event even more perilous.This play is an homage to fast-moving farces while also addressing Aboriginal issues. Cerulean Blue deals with relationships, perceptions, politics, and what to do when you discover youve been dating your first cousin. Add a few spoonfuls of original blues music, and youve got a fun-filled evening.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. An original musical score by Andrew Clemens will be available for download from Talonbooks.com.Cast of ten women and ten men.

George F. Walker has been one of Canadas most prolific and popular playwrights since his career in theatre began in the early 1970s. Since that time, he has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series, including Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland, and The Line, as well as for the film Niagara Motel (based on three plays from his Suburban Motel series).Part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll, Walkers distinctive, gritty, fast-paced comedies satirize the selfishness, greed, and aggression of contemporary urban culture. Awards and honours include appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada (2005); National Theatre School Gascon-Thomas Award (2002); two Governor Generals Literary Awards for Drama (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred); five Dora Mavor Moore Awards; and eight Chalmers Canadian Play Awards.Patrick McDonald is artistic director of Green Thumb Theatre, where he has directed more than seventy-five productions and overseen the commissioning and development of more than fifty new plays for children, teens, and young adults.

In Inuit mythology, sila means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeaus 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).There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges especially raising children and maintaining family ties is always more powerful than reciting facts and figures.Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He has been asked during his many visits to Okanagan bookstores over the years to publish a collection of his writing about the Valley.Writing the Okanagan draws on forty books Bowering has published since 1960 poetry, fiction, history, and some forms he may have invented. Selections from Delsing (1961) and Sticks & Stones (1962) are here, as is “Driving to Kelowna” from The Silver Wire (1966). Other Okanagan towns, among them Rock Creek, Peachland, Vernon, Kamloops, Princeton, and Osoyoos, inspire selections from work published through the 1970s and on to 2013. Fairview, the old mining site near Oliver, is the focus of an excerpt from Caprice (1987, 2010), one volume in Bowering’s trilogy of historical novels. “Desert Elm” takes as its two main subjects the Okanagan Valley and his father, who, as Bowering did, grew up there. With the addition of some previously unpublished works, the reader will find the wonder of the Okanagan here, in both prose and poetry.

At precisely the cultural moment you were hoping for, a dream team of smart, sexy, brunette, West Coast poets of Italian descent has passionately co-authored an intelligent collection of poetry that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy.From the origin of the genre (It Happened One Night) to its contemporary expressions (Love Actually), the poems in Rom Com trace the attempt to deconstruct as well as engage in dialogue with romantic comedy films and the pop culture, celebrities, and tropes that have come to be associated with them. These irreverent, playful, weird, and comedic poems come in a variety of forms, fully engaging in pop culture, without a judgmental tone. They see your frumpy expectations and raise you issues of sexuality, consent, sexism, homophobia, race, and class. They explore the highs and lows of romantic relationships and the expectations and realities of love, tackling real emotional worlds through the lens of film.Two cool people wrote it. Dina Del Bucchia, the fashionable and voluptuous, is a woman on the go, brazenly hosting literary events and tweeting about otters and award shows. Daniel Zomparelli, the handsome and dashing, is a young, gay man-about-Vancouver who somehow also quietly edits (in chief) a semi-annual poetry journal. (Ship them all you want, fools.)How to tell if you are compatible with this book: Are you equally versed in literature and pop culture? Are you a film-savvy fan of contemporary poetry? Are you an academic with interest in literature and cultural studies? Are you in general a cool, sad person? This book might just be the sassy best friend youve wanted.

In Canadas first bilingual play, an award-winning classic, the English and the French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment. Three families and the neighbourhood delivery boy sit on balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer, forced to listen to election promises in both languages from the broadcast truck of Gatan Bolduc, who is running for re-election for the Liberals.

Autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the life of young Michel Tremblay, who later became Canadas most important playwright. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphe and The Night Visitors, and about how each led to his discovery of his emerging emotional sensibilities.

Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script of Marc Lescarbots Theatre of Neptune in New France, two twentieth-century English translations, Ben Jonsons Masque of Blackness, and an extensive historical and critical introduction by Jerry Wasserman.

A history of modern Iran, and a revealing first-hand account by Irans first female vice-president, Massoumeh Ebtekar, of the 1979 revolutionary students who captured the American embassy in Tehran. Ebtekar sets out to correct decades of misrepresentation by the Western media of what the aims of the Iranian students and the populist revolution they personified were, and have since remained.

A vivid, contemporary travelogue by Fred A. Reed. From Bosnian actuality to Macedonian potentiality, Reeds travels in this region lead him to encounter a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony: ethno-racialist aspirations remain the only coin in which peoples feel they can express their belonging, their social solidarity the only credible alternative to the blight of free market globalism.

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.Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-engineered form of rice that could save an overpopulated world on the brink of catastrophic famine. The play examines how good, smart, well-intentioned individuals are drawn into, and corrupted by, complex institutional systems, be they corporate, military, or governmental.

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity even, quite possibly, a compromised immune system, and certainly, in many cases, complete and utter memory loss both before and after. It seemed only natural, then, for playwright Morris Panych to put these two types of human experience together into one play. After all, both take practice.This dark and steamy comedy 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.

Canadas 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.We the Family s list of characters reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the main characters, David and Lizzie Kaplan, a JewishIrish Catholic mixed marriage, marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese Canadian widow. Theres also a Russian mistress, a Palestinian lover, and a glamorous, possibly fraudulent Italian psychologist, while offstage Pakistani terrorists kidnap the also-offstage honeymooning couple, then sell them to Sicilian gangsters who sell them to Russian gangsters, one of whom turns out to be the father of the Russian mistress (another family).By the end of the play, Walker has deconstructed the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the plays pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrifying ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving in viciously selfish and self-centred ways. These hyphenated Canadians certainly arent nice, and no amount of sweet-and-sour matzah balls (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe the painter in Woolfs To the Lighthouse Mary Meigs portrays herself, her family, and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. She describes the three major decisions of her life: not to marry, to be an artist, and to listen to her own voices.