Essential Drama

Tass Nazor has given up her cello to buy a three-story stone apartment building. Her friends/tenants, a clingy seller and semi-reliable handyman, drive her to the brink. The sequel, Rooftop Eden, finds Tass hosting a memorial dinner for one who has died, meanwhile juggling motherhood and a musical career. A few months later, Famously delivers the ultimate clash of ambition versus domestic bliss. Seven actors play 17 characters. Features music by the incomparable Mile End composer/performer Patrick Watson.

Revolt/Compassion: Six Scripts for Contemporary Performance, gathers together six important works by Michael Springate: Historical Bliss, Dog and Crow, The Consolation of Philosophy, Freeport Texas, Kareena, and Kut: Shock and Awe. Written and produced over a twenty-five year period, they capture an expansive range of interests and influences, and reflect the artistic interdisciplinarity which has been a defining feature of his career. Dr. Erin Hurley, in her ground-breaking introduction, writes: Consciously crafted, precise in their diction, and allusive in their references, these plays ask for the reader's collaboration ? Their poetry ? the considered arrangement of the words, the shape of the text on the page, the accretion of meaning across the play, its solicitation of the reader's increased awareness ? activates the senses without necessarily dictating where they should take me or what I should make of them. At the same time, the ideas unfolded require a different vantage, a theoretical engage

Freeze is an allegorical comedy that dramatizes the Great Ice Storm of '98 as a metaphor for "cooler", more tolerant times in Quebec compared to the separatist "heat" of earlier decades. Five Montrealers find themselves trapped inside the power-outed duplex of Nicole, a pur-laine pro-sovereignty journalist. Her boyfriend Curtis, a Black Anglo jazz musician, arrives with a shocking marriage proposal. Mickey, an Irish gambling-addicted handyman, exploits the storm by selling firewood at exorbitant prices. And Hydro Quebec lineman Réjean tries to do his job, while Claire, the horny elderly neighbor, struggles to mediate. This dysfunctional quintet butt heads over politics and love, provoking us to ponder whether Montreal's "two solitudes" has become a stereotype in this new Century.

Camerado is a play presenting the very dramatic life and compelling thoughts of Walt Whitman, who remains the foremost American poet of the greatness possible in the human spirit, and in the spirit of a vital democracy. His inspiring views and tough criticisms, expressed in simple, but beautiful and powerful language remain as critically relevant to us today as they were in his lifetime. History placed Pius XII on trial during his reign as pope, from 1939 to 1958, testing how a moral and religious leader, in his case of the largest Christian church on earth, should lead in the midst of World War II, the Cold War, and horrible mass crimes against humanity. This play presents very dramatic but fair views of that test and how the pope performed vis a vis them, and provokes thoughts about moral leaders facing great challenges in our time.