Cantata & The Extinction Therapist
Two Plays by Clem Martini
- Publisher
- Durvile Publications
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2023
- Category
- Playwriting, Health Care Issues, Environmental Conservation & Protection
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781990735240
- Publish Date
- Apr 2023
- List Price
- $29.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Clem Martini's award-winning play, Cantata: Rumours of My Crazy, Useless Life provides a window into the experience of people going through the hidden, high-stakes struggles of elder care and mental illness. In Cantata, Martin Bussinger discovers his elderly mother’s health and mental acuity is deteriorating, facing him with emotional and medical problems that feel almost unsolvable. He realizes that negotiating the delicate network of caregiving, strung together with the further challenge of supporting a brother living with a mental illness, places him in a situation that is simultaneously heartrending and darkly comic.
In The Extinction Therapist, Dr. Marshall’s therapeutic practice offers group support to those threatened with extinction including a woolly mammoth, a testy short-eared shrew, the uncompromising smallpox virus, an insecure tyrannosaurus rex They all convene to receive therapy, in an attempt to come to terms with the complicated, volatile feelings associated with their life-and-death circumstances.
Cantata was named winner in the full-length category of Theatre BC’s 2021 Canadian Playwriting Competition and following the play’s premiere production with Sage Theatre on April 28, 2022. it was named Most Outstanding New Play in the Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards. As Martini puts it, “Some readers will recognize themselves in these characters. Some may even be going through these trials right now.” The book will be of interest to theatre practitioners, students of acting and directing, social workers, therapists, nurses and others in the caregiving professions as well.
About the authors
Clem Martini is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter with over thirty plays and nine books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit, including Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness, winner of the Calgary Book Award, and his most recent anthology of plays, Martini with a Twist. He has served on the boards of numerous writing organizations including the Alberta Playwrights Network, the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. His texts on playwriting, The Blunt Playwright and The Greek Playwright, are used in universities and colleges across the country. He is currently a professor in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.
Naheed K. Nenshi's profile page
Cliff Kirchhoff's profile page
CHRISTINE BRUBAKER is a director, actor and educator. She splits her time between Calgary, where she is on faculty at University of Calgary's School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA), and Toronto, where she works in a variety of theatre contexts, including directing, dramaturging new work and performing. Christine is the creator and co-writer of Henry G20, a large-scale outdoor performance. She is the winner of two Dora Mavor Awards for Performance, the 2014 Gina Wilkinson Prize for Direction, and the 2016 Ken MacDougall Prize for Emerging Director.
Awards
- Winner, W.O. Mitchell Award
Excerpt: Cantata & The Extinction Therapist: Two Plays by Clem Martini (by (author) Clem Martini; foreword by Naheed K. Nenshi & Christine Brubaker; photographs by Cliff Kirchhoff)
Introduction to The Extinction Therapist
By Clem Martini
I wrote The Extinction Therapist because I spent most of the past decade feeling depressed and angry—and according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBPS), I had every right to feel this way.
IPBPS indicates that one million species are threatened with extinction, that marine pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, and that a third or more of all amphibians are at risk of extinction. Furthermore, according to the UN’s bulletin on The Environment Programme and the climate emergency:
Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. A wave of change is sweeping through the world with unstoppable momentum and…without profound changes to these sectors and a drastic cut to our carbon footprint, there is little hope to protect the planet from the worst effects of a warmer world.
Dire stuff. Obviously, I had to do something. Then, as I was sitting at my desk staring at my computer one afternoon, I heard a shrill voice off in the shadows complaining that ‘The frustrating thing is that I can do nothing. What can I do? I’m a shrew.” Soon the other characters emerged from the darkness. As I crafted The Extinction Therapist over the subsequent years, I was supremely puzzled by the disconnect that existed between the high anxiety I felt, compared to the collective, world-wide response to climate change and mass extinction—surely an existential crisis—which could best be characterized as disinterested, distracted, inactive, and rife with misinformation and total, unadulterated BS.
Consider this classic quote from right-wing Breitbart News. “The two biggest human threats to wildlife in the last century have been a) Communists and b) Environmentalists.”
Or this nugget of misinformation my own province’s premier, Danielle Smith, shared when questioned about her party’s views on climate change: “We have always said the science isn’t settled and we need to continue to monitor the debate.”
Or the observation that the former leader of the United States of America, Donald Trump, always a gold mine for inane and irresponsible remarks, offered: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
Clearly, we live in strange, strange times.
The cast of The Extinction Therapist, as they assembled, were a belligerent assortment of misfits and expendables, but between 2014 and 2023 these characters became my close confidants. I have rarely enjoyed living with individuals (and yes, when you work on play for nearly a decade, you actually do end up living with them) as much as I have enjoyed living with this particular support group. I loved the empathy and hope that Woolly Mammoth demonstrated, I relished the prickly volatility of Shrew, the sense of rage at injustice that burned in Smallpox, the vulnerability and total engagement with the healing process that T Rex expressed. And if Glen was no more competent than many of the politicians I’ve met, he at least had a sense of humour, a facet many politicians sadly lack.
This was the team with whom I shared my concerns when my city, Calgary, was choked with the obscuring woodsmoke of raging forest fires for weeks on end, when Fort McMurray burned for nearly a year, when Lytton, BC experienced a sudden spike of heat that made it the hottest place in Canada in recorded history, and then suddenly, tragically, incinerated. When the Splendid Poison Frog, and the Baiji Dolphin both winked out of existence in the same year, 2020, I mourned their loss with my Extinction Therapist cohort.
But why, you might ask, did I write The Extinction Therapist as a dark comedy? Because, let’s be honest, the situation we live in is absurd, abundantly, astonishingly absurd. But also, because there is no energy to be found in despair. If we can laugh together, we can admit to one another that, yes, this situation is ludicrous—and terrible—and we must do something.
Time is running out, certainly, as Dennis tells Glen, but change is still possible.
—Clem Martini, 2023
Introduction to The Extinction Therapist
By Clem Martini
I wrote The Extinction Therapist because I spent most of the past decade feeling depressed and angry—and according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBPS), I had every right to feel this way.
IPBPS indicates that one million species are threatened with extinction, that marine pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, and that a third or more of all amphibians are at risk of extinction. Furthermore, according to the UN’s bulletin on The Environment Programme and the climate emergency:
Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. A wave of change is sweeping through the world with unstoppable momentum and…without profound changes to these sectors and a drastic cut to our carbon footprint, there is little hope to protect the planet from the worst effects of a warmer world.
Dire stuff. Obviously, I had to do something. Then, as I was sitting at my desk staring at my computer one afternoon, I heard a shrill voice off in the shadows complaining that ‘The frustrating thing is that I can do nothing. What can I do? I’m a shrew.” Soon the other characters emerged from the darkness. As I crafted The Extinction Therapist over the subsequent years, I was supremely puzzled by the disconnect that existed between the high anxiety I felt, compared to the collective, world-wide response to climate change and mass extinction—surely an existential crisis—which could best be characterized as disinterested, distracted, inactive, and rife with misinformation and total, unadulterated BS.
Consider this classic quote from right-wing Breitbart News. “The two biggest human threats to wildlife in the last century have been a) Communists and b) Environmentalists.”
Or this nugget of misinformation my own province’s premier, Danielle Smith, shared when questioned about her party’s views on climate change: “We have always said the science isn’t settled and we need to continue to monitor the debate.”
Or the observation that the former leader of the United States of America, Donald Trump, always a gold mine for inane and irresponsible remarks, offered: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
Clearly, we live in strange, strange times.
The cast of The Extinction Therapist, as they assembled, were a belligerent assortment of misfits and expendables, but between 2014 and 2023 these characters became my close confidants. I have rarely enjoyed living with individuals (and yes, when you work on play for nearly a decade, you actually do end up living with them) as much as I have enjoyed living with this particular support group. I loved the empathy and hope that Woolly Mammoth demonstrated, I relished the prickly volatility of Shrew, the sense of rage at injustice that burned in Smallpox, the vulnerability and total engagement with the healing process that T Rex expressed. And if Glen was no more competent than many of the politicians I’ve met, he at least had a sense of humour, a facet many politicians sadly lack.
This was the team with whom I shared my concerns when my city, Calgary, was choked with the obscuring woodsmoke of raging forest fires for weeks on end, when Fort McMurray burned for nearly a year, when Lytton, BC experienced a sudden spike of heat that made it the hottest place in Canada in recorded history, and then suddenly, tragically, incinerated. When the Splendid Poison Frog, and the Baiji Dolphin both winked out of existence in the same year, 2020, I mourned their loss with my Extinction Therapist cohort.
But why, you might ask, did I write The Extinction Therapist as a dark comedy? Because, let’s be honest, the situation we live in is absurd, abundantly, astonishingly absurd. But also, because there is no energy to be found in despair. If we can laugh together, we can admit to one another that, yes, this situation is ludicrous—and terrible—and we must do something.
Time is running out,
Editorial Reviews
“Rapturously well written by Calgary playwright Clem Martini ...The Extinction Therapist is an absolute triumph. It is a rare, great play.”
— JEFF MAHONEY The Hamilton Spectator
“Devastatingly beautiful ... a testament to Martini’s skill as a writer. Cantata holds its audience spellbound for two hours and but also with the humour he finds in this family tragedy.”
— LOUIS B. HOBSON, The Calgary Herald
