Festival Man


Geoff Berner - 2013
    Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, explosive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

Between


Angie Abdou - 2014
    They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in help with their sons―a woman from the Philippines named Ligaya (which means happiness), whom the boys call LiLi. Vero justifies LiLi's role in their home by insisting that she is part of their family, and she goes to great lengths in order to ease her conscience. But differences persist; Vero grapples with her overextended role as a mother and struggles to keep her marriage passionate, while LiLi silently bears the burden of a secret she left behind at home.Between offers readers an intriguing, searing portrait of two women from two different cultures. At the same time, it satirizes contemporary love, marriage, and parenthood by exposing the sense of entitlement and superiority at the heart of upper-middle-class North American existence through a ubiquitous presence in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou comically and tragically tackles the issue of international nannies by providing a window on motherhood where it is tangled up with class, career, labour, and desire

Lazarus And His Beloved, A One Act Play


Kahlil Gibran - 2009
    

Fronteras Americanas


Guillermo Verdecchia - 1993
    This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simón Bolívar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor’s travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; �La Bamba’ and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American made-for-TV drug-wars movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and clichés, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing.Cast of one man.

Red Velvet


Lolita Chakrabarti - 2012
    It makes the blood rush."Olivier-award winning actor Adrian Lester plays Ira Alridge in the world premiere of Lolita Chakrabarti's new play, Red Velvet, which launches Indhu Rubasingham's reign as the Tricycle Theatre's new Artistic Director. The play is set in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest actor of his generation, has collapsed on stage whilst playing Othello. A young black American actor, Ira Aldridge, has been asked to take over the role. But, as the public riot in the streets, how will the cast, critics and audience react to the revolution taking place in the theatre?Written by the 2012 Most Promising Playwright (Evening Standard Awards) Lolita Chakrabarti, Red Velvet uses imagined experiences based on the often-forgotten, but true, story of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who, in the nineteenth century, built an incredible reputation on the stages of London and Europe.

Fish in the Dark: A Play


Larry David - 2015
    This sidesplitting play, a testimony to David’s great writing talent, is also his first time on Broadway—in fact, his first time acting on stage since eighth grade. In Fish in the Dark Larry David stars as Norman Drexel, a man in his fifties who is average in most respects except for his hyperactive libido. As Norman and his family try to navigate the death of a loved one, old acquaintances and unsettled arguments resurface with hilarious consequences.Fish in the Dark has its world premiere at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on March 5, 2015, starring Larry David.

Road Ends


Mary Lawson - 2013
    He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing—the only thing—that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand. Mary Lawson’s beloved novels, Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, have delighted legions of readers around the world. The fictional, northern Ontario town of Struan, buried in the winter snows, is the vivid backdrop to her breathtaking new novel.  Roads End brings us a family unravelling in the aftermath of tragedy: Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years held the family together but has finally broken free and gone to England, to try to make a life of her own.  Roads End is Mary Lawson at her best. In this masterful, enthralling, tender novel, which ranges from the Ontario silver rush of the early 1900s to swinging London in the 1960s, she gently reveals the intricacies and anguish of family life, the push and pull of responsibility and individual desire, the way we can face tragedy, and in time, hope to start again.

Elephant's Graveyard


George Brant - 2010
    Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated Ameri

Dying City


Christopher Shinn - 2006
    . . Dying City is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It’s about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.”?The New York Observer “Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the . . . sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City.”?The New York Times In Christopher Shinn’s new play Dying City, a young therapist, Kelly, whose husband Craig was killed while on military duty in Iraq, is confronted a year later by his identical twin Peter, who suspects that Craig’s death was not accidental. Set in a spare downtown-Manhattan apartment after dark, scenes shift from the confrontation between Peter and Kelly, to Kelly’s complicated farewell with her husband Craig. Shinn’s creepy, sophisticated drama?infused with references to 9/11 and the war in Iraq?explores how contemporary politics and recent history have transformed the lives of these three characters. Christopher Shinn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in New York. His plays include Where Do We Live, Other People, What Didn’t Happen, and On the Mountain, which have been widely produced in New York, across the United States, and in London. He is the recipient of an OBIE Award in Playwriting, as well as the Robert S. Chesney Award. He teaches playwriting at The New School for Drama.

Etiquette and Vitriol: The Food Chain and Other Plays


Nicky Silver - 1996
    The first play collection by a young master of razor-sharp wit and black humor.

Bachelorette


Leslye Headland - 2011
    Fueled by jealousy and resentment, the girls embark on a night of debauchery that goes from playfully wasted to devastatingly destructive. Their old fears, unfulfilled desires and deep bonds with each other transform a prenuptial bender into a night they'll never forget. A wicked black comedy about female friendship and growing up in an age of excess.

Plays 4: Betrayal / Monologue / One for the Road / Mountain Language / Family Voices / A Kind of Alaska / Victoria Station / Precisely / The New World Order / Party Time / Moonlight / Ashes to Ashes / Celebration


Harold Pinter - 1977
    

God's Ear: A Play


Jenny Schwartz - 2008
    Through the skillfully disarming use of clichéd language and homilies, the play explores with subtle grace and depth the way the death of a child tears one family apart, while showcasing the talents of a promising young playwright who "in [a] very modern way [is] making a rather old-fashioned case for the power of the written word" (Jason Zinoman, The New York Times).Fresh from its critically acclaimed off-off-Broadway run this past spring, God's Ear moves off-Broadway to the Vineyard Theatre in April 2008.

The Singer's Gun


Emily St. John Mandel - 2009
    His parents deal in stolen goods and his first career is a partnership venture with his cousin Aria selling forged passports and social security cards to illegal aliens. Anton longs for a less questionable way of living in the world and by his late twenties has reinvented himself as a successful middle manager. Then a routine security check suggests that things are not quite what they appear. And Aria begins blackmailing him to do one last job for her. But the seemingly simple job proves to have profound and unexpected repercussions.

Where White Horses Gallop


Beatrice MacNeil - 2007
    England has declared war on Germany, and Canada will march beside her. Soon the lives of five young friends living in rugged, pristine Cape Breton will be changed forever. Fiddler Benny Doucet, prospective med student Calum MacPherson, and fisherman Hector MacDonald all decide to enlist. But Calum's handicapped brother Hamish is stuck at home, while Alex MacGreggor, in love with the postmistress, hides in his mother's attic. The fate of these devoted friends, during and after the war, hinges on forces beyond their control in this lyrical, vibrant novel by an award-winning writer.