It is an exploration of intimacy, identity, and the courage it takes to be who you really are.

    Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion, an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete, whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form - Dominic Dromgoole.

    In Eyes for Consuela, based on Octavio Paz’s classic story “The Blue Bouquet,” a vacationing American encounters a knife-toting Mexican bandit on a gruesome quest. And in When the World Was Green, cowritten with Joseph Chaikin, a journalist in search of her father interviews an old man who resolved a generations-old vendetta by murdering the wrong man. Together, these plays form a powerful trio from an enduring force in American theater.

    As oil prices continue to plummet, the economic outlook grows bleaker by the day. Political changes have ushered in an era of uncertainty. And, as though mirroring the city’s fortunes, the Edmonton Oilers continue to struggle on the ice, offering little solace or escape to the city’s long-suffering hockey fans. But on June 26, 2015, hope was reborn in Edmonton. With the first overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft, the Edmonton Oilers selected Connor McDavid, a once-in-a-generation talent who, at only eighteen years old, was already being compared to the Great One who had preceded him twenty-five years earlier. Sparked by the arrival of McDavid, the construction of a new state-of-the-art hockey arena, and the development of a revitalized downtown core, a new sensibility began to emerge in Edmonton. Sensing an opportunity, the city started to rebuild and rebrand itself in search of a new future. Through exclusive access, uplifting anecdotes, and colourful interviews, The McDavid Effect traces the renewal of not just a hockey team, but of an entire city. Reflecting the multitude of viewpoints that make up Edmonton—from Connor himself to construction crews at work on the downtown development to business executives directing the new shape of the Albertan capital—The McDavid Effect paints a portrait of the city as it is being reimagined, captures the near-religious reverence people have for sports, and shows how the people of Edmonton are coming to hope again.

    This phenomenon in effect brought the terror, the panic, the horror and the sense of helplessness of the Great War home with the returning soldiers—more people died of this epidemic than had been killed in battle throughout the armed conflict.As fear of the dreaded flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. The town is quarantined in an attempt to keep the illness out. Trains are forbidden to stop, no one can enter, and the borders are sealed. Mail from overseas, feared to be carrying the deadly virus, is gathered and then burned. But when the disease descends upon the town despite their precautions, the citizens begin to turn on each other as they attempt to find a scapegoat for the crisis.Very little has been written about this worldwide calamity which, more than the war itself, destroyed forever the genteel and naive presumptions of European colonial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kevin Kerr offers audiences not only an epic chronicle of this forgotten chapter of Canadian history, but a chilling preview of the beginnings of our own new century.The play is a gothic romance, filled with dark comedy and the desperate embrace of life at the edge of death.

    When a young actor from the big city lives with two aging bachelor farmers to gather stories about rural life, the farmers' lives are irrevocably altered when art attempts to imitate life and the line between truth and fiction is crossed.

    Lyly took up the story of two young women, Galatea (or Gallathea) and Phillida who are dressed up in male clothes by their fathers so that they can avoid the requirement of the god Neptune that every year "the fairest and chastest virgin in all the country be sacrificed to a sea-monster." Hiding together in the forest, the two maidens fall in love, each supposing the other to be a young man. "Galatea" has become the subject of considerable feminist critical study in recent years. "Midas" (1590) uses mythology in quite a different way, dramatizing two stories about King Midas in such a way as to fashion a satire of King Philip of Spain (and of any tyrant like him) for colossal greediness and folly. In the wake of the defeat of Philip's Armada fleet and its attempted invasion of England in 1588, this satire was calculated to win the approval of Queen Elizabeth and her court.

    Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots is a satire of colonization that celebrates Native women as creators and healers. It has become a classic in Canadian theatre since it was first published in 1991 and is now widely studied at universities and colleges across North America and around the world.The remarkable radio play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea, first produced or CBC Radio Drama's Vanishing Point: Adventure Stories for Big Girls, is also included.

    It's become more expensive, more exclusive, and effectively off-limits to huge swaths of the potential sports-loving population. Youth registration numbers are stagnant; efforts to appeal to new Canadians are often grim at best; the game, increasingly, does not resemble the country of which it's for so long been an integral part. These signs worried Sean Fitz-Gerald. As a lifelong hockey fan and father of a young mixed-race son falling headlong in love with the game, he wanted to get to the roots of these issues. His entry point: a season with the Peterborough Petes, a storied OHL team far from its former glory in a once-emblematic Canadian city that is finding itself on the wrong side of the country's changing demographics. Fitz-Gerald profiles the players, coaches and front office staff, a mix of world-class talents with NHL aspirations and Peterborough natives happy with more modest dreams. Through their experiences, their widely varied motivations and expectations, we get a rich, colourful understanding of who ends up playing hockey in Canada and why. Fitz-Gerald interweaves the action of the season with portraits of public figures who've shaped and been shaped by the game: authors who captured its spirit, politicians who exploited it, and broadcasters who try to embody and sell it. He finds his way into community meetings full of angry season ticket holders, as well as into sterile boardrooms full of the sport's institutional brain trust, unable to break away from the inertia of tradition and hopelessly at war with itself. Before the Lights Go Out is a moving, funny, yet unsettling picture of a sport at a crossroads. Fitz-Gerald's warm but rigorous journalistic approach reads, in the end, like a letter to a troubled friend: it's not too late to save hockey in this country, but who has the will to do it?

    Arriving at the remote rural farm, and immediately drawn into the dysfunction of the family s relationships, Tom is blindsided by his lost partner s legacy of untruth. With the mother expecting a chainsmoking girlfriend, and the older brother hellbent on preserving a facade of normalcy, Tom is coerced into joining the duplicity until, at last, he confronts the torment that drove his lover to live in the shadows of deceit. The lover the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival. In this same rural setting, one young man had once destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy, years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom. In a play that unfolds with progressively blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, between truth and elaborate ?ction, Bouchard dramatizes how gay men often must learn to lie before they learn how to love. Throughout 2011 and 2012, "Tom at the Farm" was produced in Quebec and France, as "Tom a la ferme," and in Mexico, as "Tom en la granja." Award-winning Quebec director Xavier Dolan adapted the play for the screen in 2013, with Caleb Landry Jones in the leading role."

    The story of two white-collar managers, Chad and Howard, who maliciously plot to jointly romance the lonely, deaf, beautiful office temp Christine before simultaneously dumping her, is cool and compelling in its depiction of the worst sorts of emotional abuse. What begins as a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship quickly escalates into full-scale psychological warfare. Only too late does this 'frat boy' prank reveal itself as deadly serious, with a struggle between the two men at the heart of the battle. The woman is only a means to an end, a pawn easily captured and tossed aside in a dark, wicked duel for corporate ascension.

    Albee there is a theme beneath the surface, in this case the corruption of money and the rottenness of this bigoted exurbia where conformity to its illiberal standards and its hypocritical show of respectability is all that counts. The scene is the suburban home of Jenny and Richard, beautifully played by Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson. The only thing that seems to stand in the way of their happiness is a lack of money. The action starts in an entertaining comedy of manners style. Then abruptly there enters a Mrs. Toothe in the menacing and fascinating person of Beatrice Straight who offers Jenny the opportunity to make more money than they have ever had, to buy a greenhouse and all the other luxuries that they require for their garden and their lives. Richard's realization that their newfound money is being earned by his wife's whoring comes almost simultaneously with the return of their fourteen-year-old son from school and a champagne cocktail party which they are giving to impress their country club friends. As a result, his horror, disgust and rage has to be kept under wraps in order to keep up essential appearances until tragedy strikes, and Richard realizes that the assembled wives are all involved and their husbands are aware and condoning." More than that, they are prepared not merely to justify but defend the ends through which their means are attained and the devastated Richard, left in agonized despair by the ironic events that charge the final moments of the play, must face the fact of his own share in their communal guilt.

    In the world that is taking shape, the unique combination of Canada's success at home as a diverse society and its reputation internationally as a sympathetic and respected partner consititute national assets that are at least as valuable as its natural resource wealth. As the world becomes more competitive and complex, and the chances of deadly conflict grow, the example and the initiative of Canada can become more important than they have ever been. That depends on its people: assets have no value if Canadians don't recognize or use them, or worse, if they waste them. A more effective Canada is not only a benefit to itself, but to its friends and neighbours. And in this compelling examination of what it as a nation has been, what it has become and what it can yet be to the world, Joe Clark takes the reader beyond formal foreign policy and looks at the contributions and leadership offered by Canada's most successful individuals and organizations who are already putting these uniquely Canadian assets to work internationally.

    Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

    He visits an old flame, buys a gun and goes on a blistering road trip through the new home front.'I don't blame the war. The war was alright. I miss it. It's just you come back to this.'Written during the London bombings of 2005, Motortown is a fierce, violent and controversial response to the anti-war movement - and to the war itself. Chaotic and complex, powerful and provocative, Simon Stephen's new play portrays a volatile and morally insecure world.Motortown premieres at the Royal Court Theatre on 21 April 2006. It follows the critically acclaimed On the Shore of the Wide World (Manchester Royal Exchange/National Theatre), winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play (2005).