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Drama Canadian

Tonight at the Tarragon

A Critic's Anthology

edited by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Publisher
Playwrights Canada Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2011
Category
Canadian, Anthologies (multiple authors)
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781770910256
    Publish Date
    Oct 2011
    List Price
    $29.95

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Description

Just in time for its fortieth birthday, Tonight at the Tarragon is the first ever anthology of plays that originated in or received their English-language premiere at Toronto’s leading playhouse, the Tarragon Theatre. Handpicked and edited by former Eye Weekly and Globe and Mail theatre critic Kamal Al-Solaylee, this anthology captures the theatre during a transitional phase in its history: 1998–2005, the final years of late Artistic Director Urjo Kareda and the first seasons of his successor Richard Rose. Overlapping Al-Solaylee’s experience as a critic in Toronto and underlining Tarragon’s survival instincts during this period, the book serves as a record of some of the most exciting theatre created in Canada as one century gave way to another.

Includes:
Half Life by John Mighton
Rune Arlidge by Michael Healey
The Optimists by Morwyn Brebner
I, Claudia by Kristen Thomson
Motel Hélène by Serge Boucher, adapted by Judith Thompson from a translation by Morwyn Brebner
It’s All True by Jason Sherman

About the author

Kamal Al-Solaylee is the author of the national bestselling memoir Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes which won the 2013 Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the CBC’s Canada Reads, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), was hailed as "brilliant" by The Walrus magazine and "essential reading" by the Globe and Mail. It was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction, the Trillium Book Award and won the Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He was previously a theatre critic at the Globe and Mail and has written reviews and features on arts and politics for all major Canadian publications, including Toronto StarNational PostThe WalrusToronto LifeElle CanadaQuill & Quire and Literary Review of Canada. He’s a two-time nominee for the National Magazine Awards, winning a Gold Medal in 2019 for columns. He holds a PhD in English and is a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Kamal Al-Solaylee's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Canadian theatre scholars should be delighted with Kamal Al-Solaylee’s new anthology of articulate and idiosyncratic plays from Tarragon’s recent history. Each of the six plays is a worthy choice for study and the contextualizing support material is not only methodologically viable but also eminently readable, a novel combination in an age in which theoretical jargon has all but trumped genuine communication. —Don Rubin, Professor of Theatre Studies, York University