Drama Books

A Little Book of Big Christmas Tales

Anne Azel

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Editorial Review:

A Little Book of Big Christmas Tales is a collection of short stories by award winning author Anne Azel. The collection includes the tale of Charlie, a street thug; Penny, a First Nations "token" employee; Paula, a woman determoned to get home to her newborn baby's first Christmas, to name a few. Anne also includes a story of her popular characters, Robbie and Janet. The connecting thread is Christmas. Each story is uniquely Anne - creative, touching, reflecting the variety and diversity found in Canadian women - and will stay with the reader long after the pages are turned. This book is one to give friends and family to keep close to one's heart. It can be enjoyed by anyone who believes, or needs to believe, in miracles and the strength of women surviving adn overcoming the trials of life.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Ann-Marie MacDonald

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

ABSOLUTELY PEE-YOUR-PANTS FUNNY 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

"Goodnight, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet)" is the funniest play I have ever read or seen. I am currently playing Constance in a high school production of the play, and the more we go along, the more we discover about the play. Upon first reading, it is an absolutely hilarious twist of Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet." But reading it a second, and even a third time will reveal subtle innuendos and wordings (warning: LOTS of sexual innuendos in this play!) that contain so much wit and humour that your respect for Anne-Marie MacDonald will grow with every scene. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. If you can familiarize yourself with the plots of both "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" before reading or seeing the play, then your enjoyment will increase, because you will have a basic understanding of how the characters have been re-interpreted. OH MY GOODNESS -- READ THIS PLAY!

Editorial Review:

In this exuberant comedy and original revision of Shakespeare's Othello and Romeo and Juliet -- Constance Ledbelly, a drab and dusty academic, deciphers a cryptic manuscript she believes to be the original source for the tragedies, and is transported into the plays themselves. She visits Juliet and Desdemona, has a hand in saving them, and finds out what these women are about. In true Shakespearean spirit, Constance plunders the plays and creates something new, all the while engaging in a personal voyage of self-discovery. With an abundance of twists, fights, dances, seductions, and wild surprises, the play is an absolute joy of theatricality.

Suburban Motel

George F. Walker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Canada's premier playwright does it again 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

George F. Walker has a knack for creating astonishing, vivid characters that exist beyond the confines of the stage. After seeing his plays, you leave convinced that these people were not simply dissolved into nothingness when the play concluded. Their lives continue on, as is sometimes most obvious when Walker revisits his characters down the road.

SUBURBAN MOTEL is a series of six plays, all taking place in the same (supposedly) seedy motel room. Each play stands alone, although some characters do pop up in more than one. The interconnecting theme, besides the location, is the despair that these characters feel.

As in most Walker plays, the plot is secondary. These are character-driven pieces, with no pat answers or Neil Simon-type wit. The inhabitants of these tales are stuck in lives they want out of, but with no clear idea as to how to leave.

Everyone will have their favorite play. Mine is CRIMINAL GENIUS, in which several criminals (including a few from previous Walker productions) decide to overthrow a vicious crimelord. Sadly, they fail miserably. I give nothing away by this; the enjoyment here comes from the characters, not the plot.

Overall, some plays don't measure up to others. They lack the bite of Walker's best plays (see ZASTROZZI or NOTHING SACRED). But less-than-perfect-Walker is still good theatre, and good reading.

Waiting for the Parade (Plays in print 1980)

John Murrell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Original & absorbing 3 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Set in Calgary during World War II, these 24 scenes follow the experiences of 5 Canadian women who form an uneasy alliance born of loneliness and tumult during an edgy wait for the parade that will herald the end.

There's Catherine, abandoned by her impulsively enlisted husband, Janet, a wartime dynamo conpensating for a secret shame, and Eve, a pacifist school-teacher hard hit by the concept of unquestioning patriotism.

Fatalist Margaret, their senior by 20 years, has one enlisted son and one arrested for protesting. Marta, a German-born Canadian citizen, becomes a target of harassment and suspicion in her own community while her senile, Nazi-sympathizing father idles in prison growing steadily crazier.

This bittersweet drama well exemplifies the isolation & loss of those left behind, against scenes of air raid drills, Red Cross activities, dark merriment & leg-painting parties.

I don't recommend this play merely for reading, as the emotional gravity and singing-rehearsal scenes would not be adequately captured, but it's worthwhile and interesting hour-&-a-half when protrayed by a talented cast.

(There are also a number of affecting monologues--most notably Marta's--suitable for actresses who want something slightly obscure to audition with.)

Editorial Review:

Set in Calgary during the Second World War, five women work for the war effort while their men are away. Cast of 5 women.

The Theatricality of Robert Lepage

Aleksandar Sasa Dundjerovic

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Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Performing Arts -> Theater -> Direction & Production

Editorial Review:

Since the 1980s, multimedia and new technologies have had a great impact on theatre, allowing performance to establish its own language of communication with the audience independent of the written text. Robert Lepage is one of the pioneers and main exponents of mixed-media performance, internationally renowned for a notoriously distinct aesthetic. Aleksandar Dundjerovic, in the first book to explore Lepage's practical work, offers a comprehensive analysis of his creative process, his "transformative mise-en-scene." The Theatricality of Robert Lepage studies several productions, including The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci and Tectonic Plates, The Seven Streams of River Ota, Zulu Time, and The Far Side of the Moon. Dundjerovic provides major new insights into Lepage's creative process through an examination of his workshops, open rehearsals, and performances, as well as interviews with Lepage and his collaborators. Outlining the key production elements of Lepage's theatricality, Dundjerovic provides a practitioner's view of how Lepage creates as a director, actor, and writer and explores Lepage's practice within both the local Québécois and the international theatre context.

The East End Plays: Part 1

George F. Walker

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The Rez Sisters: A Play in Two Acts

Tomson Highway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Sisters from the Rez 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This was a really dramatic play that expressed many issues that many people would never talk about in a book. It dealt with rape, death and solidarity among Native women. When it was assigned in my first year English class, I was not sure what to think before I read it. After I read it I found that it was one of the best plays that I have ever read and gives new insight into the Native culture in Canada.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play

Nominated for the Governor General's Award

This award-winning play by Native playwright Tomson Highway is a powerful and moving portrayal of seven women from a reserve attempting to beat the odds by winning at bingo. And not just any bingo. It is THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD and a chance to win a way out of a tortured life.

The Rez Sisters is hilarious, shocking, mystical and powerful, and clearly establishes the creative voice of Native theatre and writing in Canada today.

The Shape of a Girl / Jewel

Joan Macleod

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, Braidie struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. MacLeod's young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.

Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine's Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralysed and dominated by loss.

Mary's Wedding

Stephen Massicotte

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Timothy Findley's The Wars (Sirocco Drama)

Dennis Garnhum

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Editorial Review:

This highly theatrical adaptation of Timothy Findley's classic novel traces the brutal coming of age of Robert Ross—a sensitive idealist who goes off to the Great War in 1915. Ross, who has a fondness for animals and shares a strong bond with his wheelchair-bound sister, trades his comfortable surroundings in Canada for the nightmare world of trench warfare. We watch Ross's slow unravelling as he moves from home to train to barracks and, finally, to the mud, smoke, and chlorine gas of the front line in France. With death and dying everywhere around him, Ross makes a desperate attempt to show his faith in life. Cruelty, heroism, terror and honour—The Wars takes us deep inside the mind of a soldier and straight onto the bloody battlefield. The Wars is one of Canada's most beloved novels, winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1977. This adaptation evokes the spirit, imagery, and heart of the novel, and adds the immediacy of the theatrical form.