Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class—a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security and predictability. Hannah, wife and mother of two teenagers, vacationing with her husband Lyle in New York, wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at the man sleeping in the bed next to her and screams. She does not remember who she is, who Lyle is, how she got there, and finally, how to speak. Revealed to the audience in a series of flashbacks and through Lyle’s search for her, she ends up wandering among strangers and street people like herself, and is picked up by an artist who “mounts” her in his studio as another of his “installations.”
As Sally Clark’s first full-length play, Lost Souls and Missing Persons is also an astonishingly complex and accomplished theatrical debut. Using a small cast to portray over twenty characters, the play stretches actors’ abilities to their very limits while continuing to challenge theatres to mount an elaborate production requiring crucially inventive set and lighting designs.
Cast of nine women and 11 men.

Sally Clark
Born in Vancouver, Sally Clark is a critically acclaimed playwright who has been dazzling audiences with her penchant for dark humour, ironic wit, and sharp character portrayals. Her plays, typically presented in a series of short, vivid, and fast-paced scenes, seamlessly combine comedic and tragic motifs to tell the stories of strong and adventurous women. In Saint Frances of Hollywood and Life without Instruction, she demonstrates her knack for dramatizing the lives of historical figures, providing a feminist re-visioning of what it means and what it costs to be a heroine. Clark has been playwright-in-residence at Theatre Passe Muraille, the Shaw Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Nakai Theatre, and Nightwood Theatre. She is also an accomplished painter, director, and filmmaker. When she was a resident artist at the Canadian Film Centre, she wrote and directed her award-winning short film Ten Ways to Abuse an Old Woman.

Clark moved to Toronto in 1974 but returned to Vancouver in 1994 and has been residing there since. For more information on the work and career of Sally Clark, visit her website.

Sally Clark's profile page