In a tight, dramatic, two-character, two-act play Ted Allan, one of Canada's best-known playwrights, challenges us to think again about love and guilt, about madness and normalcy. My Sister's Keeper was first produced at the 1976 Lennoxville Festival in Quebec. (an earlier version, entitled 'I've Seen You Cut Lemons,' had been directed by Sean Connery at the Fortune Theatre in London in 1970.) It is a play about sensitivity and about victims; about what we do to each other and particularly about what society does to women; about what makes us able to love and what prevents us from allowing ourselves to love. One day 'schizophrenic' Sarah arrives--to stay--at the London flat of her successful, 'normal' brother. The ensuing confrontations lead us, when we can catch our breath, to ask just who it is that is insane, and why?

Alan Herman in Montréal. A dedicated Young Communist, he was a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Worker and The Clarion, and it was then that he adopted the name Ted Allan to infiltrate a fascist organization and write an exposé. He served in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, of which This Time a Better Earth is a fictionalized account. His later novel Love Is a Long Shot (1984), which won the Stephen Leacock Award, is a humorous and autobiographical portrait of a teenage socialist. Ted Allan’s best-known book is The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune (1952), written in collaboration with Sydney Gordon and later adapted for the screen.

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