These two plays by renowned playwright Catherine Banks explore the stories of strong women as they work through their pasts. In Bitter Rose, after a morning of racing around the small liberal arts town where she lives in her bloodied wedding dress, Rose (43), barricades herself in the basement family room to examine her life. For sixteen years she has made small choices (she thought), but on the morning her husband leaves to meet with his female graduate student, she realizes the betrayal that is destroying her is that of the girl artist inside of her. Often painfully funny but with a brutal honesty, Rose confronts what is at the root of her terror of the blank canvas and makes the decision to begin her art.

In Three Storey, Ocean View, Peg has brought her ailing mother, Ruth, to Nova Scotia. Peg sees the old three storey house by the sea as refuge, a place of safety for her mother and a place to begin again with her own angry daughter 14-year-old Zoe. However, when Ruth enters the house she is drawn into the lives of the women who once inhabited it. As the women of the house play out their stories Ruth gathers the courage to tell her own story and in the end, Ruth, Peg and Zoe choose grace over pain thereby offering a small new beginning.

Plays by Catherine Banks include Bone Cage; Eula's Offer; The Summer of the Piping Plover; Three Storey, Ocean View; and Bitter Rose. Bitter Rose has aired on Bravo! Canada. Her work has been performed in Manitoba, Toronto, Calgary, and St. John's at the LSPU Hall. Three Storey, Ocean View won the Silver Medal in the 1995 du Maurier National Play Competition and was nominated for a Merrit Award for best new play in 2000. Bone Cage was awarded the Special Merit prize in the 2002 Theatre BC New Play Competition and was showcased at the National Arts Centre's On the Verge in 2005. Her work is poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical. Some of her characters, Lud in Three Storey Ocean View and Clarence in Bone Cage, have been described as Atlantic Gothic. Always a writer, Catherine started professional life as a special education teacher. She began writing plays while raising her children, Rilla and Simon. She currently lives and writes in Sambro, Nova Scotia.

Catherine Banks' profile page