by prfire | Feb 9, 2016 | Book Reviews, Drama
When I first encountered Canadian theatre, I was told a specific difficulty local practitioners faced was the lack of an “established” status for local playwrights to aspire to. It was explained that “lack of history” was to blame for the permanent condition of the...
by prfire | Jan 26, 2015 | Book Reviews, Drama
Carolyn Gray looks back some 350 years to the French playwright Molière and his play The Miser or L’Avare to find the subject for The Miser of Middlegate, the latest in her series of plays set in Winnipeg. Her version, like the original, places a rich miser at the...
by prfire | Jun 10, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
Reading plays in book form is always a different process from seeing them on stage. They become literature and need to engage without the visual and oral elements of a stage production. The book form should work well for this collection, since much of the material...
by prfire | Apr 22, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
Playwright Carolyn Gray’s North Main Gothic follows the story of Ian Trelkovsky, a Winnipeg bureaucrat and slum landlord, who takes a nightmarish journey into the underground life of his city. His journey begins one night with a car accident on Winnipeg’s Main Street...
by prfire | Mar 20, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
In his introduction to The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, editor Daniel David Moses expresses the hope that the work of First Nations writers in Canada today has reached the point where it can be read on its own terms simply as literature, without...
by prfire | Dec 19, 2013 | Book Reviews, Drama
Metastasis and Other Plays by Alberta playwright Gordon Pengilly is a collection of three plays drawn from a sizable body of work dating back to 1975 that Pengilly has written for stage and radio. It’s clear that a publication of his work has been long overdue, and...
