Welcome to Blakkat Theatre, home of the improv comedy troupe Kerfuffle!

Please permit us to introduce our Cast of Players:

NELLIE WOLFE: age 28, recent orphan, pregnant disabled avenger and sword thief

ANDY MCLEAN: age 21, redhead, devoted bike rider and aspiring Anarchist

CONSTANZIA FORGIONE: age 28, reluctant waitress, emerging gay poet and Nellie's BFF

CALVAIRE PERSONNE: age 29, PHD candidate, brother to a living sister and a dead twin

SHERMAN SILVERSTEIN: turning 30, father, maker of Jesus Toast, married, for now

YOU, OUR AUDIENCE-PARTICIPANT: at every age, your input is an essential ingredient

Kerfuffle is a seriously funny book about serious matters. Jumping on and off stage, the troupe do their best to make sense and nonsense of their lives and the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Uncertain which player is her baby daddy, nine-months-pregnant Nellie Wolfe wields her crutch as both prop and weapon to hunt him down. She bands with feminist friends to teach the troupe's male members about the responsible use of their members. From hidden weapons to the marketing of Jesus Toast, simmering personal and political secrets build to an explosive on-stage reveal. It's an inside-Anarchy exposé of G20's crucible moments from black balaclavas to a burning police car to life inside the kettle. As satire at its best, it offers both belly laughs and a demand for justice.

Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a mom, binge knitter, disabled senior writer, accessibility consultant and retired high school drama teacher and union activist. She grew up in Alderwood, Toronto, and spent childhood summers at a three-generation cottage near Fenelon Falls.

For three decades, she worked in three provinces as a high school English/Drama teacher, teaching on a Mennonite Colony, a four-room schoolhouse, an adult learning centre attached to a prison and a highly diverse new high school in Pickering. Elected to her union executive in multiple capacities, she served as Branch President and Picket Captain. While coaching for the Canadian Improv Games, she created and toured staff and student improv workshops to fight bullying, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and homophobia.

Dorothy sits on the Accessibility Advisory Committee of the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) and is an executive member of Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP) where she writes a monthly column on disability for the newsletter.

Her work has appeared in: Nothing Without Us, REFUSE, Wordgathering, Alt-Minds, All Lit Up, Don’t Talk to Me About Love, Little Fiction Big Truths, 49th Shelf and Open Book. Her first novel, When Fenelon Falls (Coach House, 2010), features a disabled teen protagonist in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. She lives in Burlington, Ontario, and can always be found tweeting @depalm.

Dorothy Ellen Palmer's profile page

Kerfuffle boils over with the energy, (re-)invention, truth-telling and wit of great improv. Like a protest or a parade, we're pulled along by the story, moved, confounded, delighted and fascinated by its participants as they explore relationships, compassion, love, grief, friendships, activism, and the possibilities of improvisation. Kerfuffle is ultimately about being seen, about allowing yourself to be seen, about seeing yourself. Meanwhile, I was happily combobulated by the kerfuffle & gobsmacked by its perfect surprises and its profound Yes, and.s.