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Canadas master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed.We the Family s list of characters reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the main characters, David and Lizzie Kaplan, a JewishIrish Catholic mixed marriage, marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese Canadian widow. Theres also a Russian mistress, a Palestinian lover, and a glamorous, possibly fraudulent Italian psychologist, while offstage Pakistani terrorists kidnap the also-offstage honeymooning couple, then sell them to Sicilian gangsters who sell them to Russian gangsters, one of whom turns out to be the father of the Russian mistress (another family).By the end of the play, Walker has deconstructed the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the plays pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrifying ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving in viciously selfish and self-centred ways. These hyphenated Canadians certainly arent nice, and no amount of sweet-and-sour matzah balls (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

In Inuit mythology, sila means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeaus play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges especially raising children and maintaining family ties is always more powerful than reciting facts and figures.Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.

Investigates the influence of technology and visual art in the work of Robert Lepage, leading figure on the international stage.

The Hatch extends Colin Browne's formal engagement with the margins of the new documentary. This is a book of transformations.

Two friends pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things and debate whether they are successful or not; in other words, whether they are winners or losers. Each friend seeks to defeat the other, and because one of these men grew up economically privileged and the other did not, the competition very quicklyheats up.Marcus Youssef is associate artistic producer at Vancouver's NeWorld Theatre and teaches theater at Concordia University in Montreal.James Long has been making theater since 1995 and is artistic director of Theatre Replacement in Vancouver..

From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. The couples newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo not just a cultural infraction, but also an ominous sign that all is not as it should be. Eager to break free of family ties that are bound too tight, Terry and Robert announce theyre moving to the affluent anglophone suburb of Beaconsfield tantamount to committing a mortal sin in the eyes of their more traditional Italian relatives. When they confess their plans to their parents over dinner one night, floodgates open to other unspoken desires and revelations, turning conservative St. Leonard values upside down.The St. Leonard Chronicles opened the 201314 season at Montreals venerable Centaur Theatre and sold out before its run. The play was extended and went on to sell more than twenty thousand tickets. The French version of the Chronicles, translated by Galluccio himself, premieres at Thetre Jean Duceppe in Montreal in December 2014 and then in 2015 embarks on a twenty-four-city tour.Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

Canadas top playwright sears the page with three new darkly comic plays that denounce political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity. The title play, Dead Metaphor, examines the collision of a politicians personal and professional lives, complicated by a sons return from Afghanistan. In The Ravine, a mayoral candidate learns that his ex-wife is living in a gully nearby and wants to put a hit on him. The Burden of Self-Awareness has money at the centre of a dramatic conflict of values. Each of the three plays is populated by characters trying to navigate the increasingly blurred lines of whats right and wrong trying to always stay informed, alert, and ready to act for the common good. Or just to get even.

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebecs North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, a local fisherman. Rose is finally tracked down in Montreal, where she lives a solitary life fogged by one of the inevitabilities of old age failing memory.Dorothea (the name Rose gives the young filmmaker), takes her back to scenes from her childhood and invites her to tell her story as they go, and so we return to a past assembled from Roses fragmented recollections.Structured as a series of short cinematic takes, this novel about recovering both personal and shared histories is told in a polyphony of voices, including Rose herself (as a child, an adolescent, and in her old age), the sexton of the village church, his three female cousins, an elderly neighbour, a villager who passes time on the harbour wall, and Roses long-deceased mother. We see fishermen on the docks with their nets, hard-at-work villagers with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, leafy gardens, and tree-lined streets, all recreated during Roses reminiscences. The problem is that many of these scenes are invented, not real. Does that matter? Or are the stories we tell more important?

Radical environmental poetics from one of Canada's most exciting spoken-word artists.

Sleep is a legible phenomenon of recorded brain waves - groups of neurons firing in a visible choir.

Poems of interpersonal disconnection in an era when we are more socially connected than ever before.

Cipher poems are decoded then re-coded and transmitted through the act of reading.

War Cantata translated by Keith TurnbullHow far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to expose wars spiral toward hatred.In 2012, SACD (Socit des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), in partnership with France Culture, awarded War Cantata the Prix SADC for best world play written in French, and CEAD (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) awarded it the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Quebec in 2012.Cast of 2 men and a chorusChild Object translated by Chantal BilodeauWith child as a blank page, a man sets about constructing his ideal companion manipulating personality, gender, and body. The child becomes the ultimate consumer good.Cast of 1 woman and 2 men

One of Canadas greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender.Karl Marx replaced Paul Claudel in Gagnons intellectual pantheon. Psychoanalysis gave rise to the desire to write, and her first works poured out in a torrent. She describes the friendships that played such a large part in her life and the feminist battles of the time with all their hopes and disappointments. At the same time she casts a sharp eye on contemporary Quebec society, tracing the emergence of a distinct Canadian literature.This is an account of a life well lived, told with candour, wisdom, and an inextinguishable sense of wonder.

Present in efforts of decolonization, reconciliation, and environmentalism, From the Poplars tempers a silence that inevitably will be broken.

DOWNVERSE bristles with insight and wit as it shifts seamlessly between issues of globalism, neoliberalism, economic volatility, and pop culture.

Meditations on the female condition pervade Catriona Strang's Corked, a poetic response to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Natalie Simpson expertly subverts syntax and crafts illuminating new language structures in these smart and often funny poems.