Tulip and other Plays
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Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781927599549
- Publish Date
- Mar 2021
- List Price
- $21.95
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Description
These plays clustered about the themes of the fragility of love and the ephemerality of life. TULIP (2006). Commissioned and developed by Nightswimming Theatre. Set in the madness of 17th Century Holland during the spectacular and frighteningly strange Dutch obsession with tulip bulbs, TULIP is a wild play about greed, beauty, deceit and botany. The bubble bursts; within days, many are ruined. Starvation and poverty ensue. Adrift in a sea of menacing shadows, the characters of TULIP must now desperately try to reconstruct their shattered lives with only the broken mirror of their hopes and dreams to guide them. WILDEST DREAMS (2013). Developed by Nightswimming Theatre & Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. Poor old Jack. It just keeps going bad. Is that any way to have a life, thinks he? Would it rain?, he wondered, gazing fearfully into the dark grey sky. It smelt like rain. A conspiracy of nature? Its no good - Audrey's screwing around. And nobody cares. And nothing makes any sense. WILDEST DREAMS is the story of middle-aged love, or love past middle-age, or the failure of this love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE (2019). Developed by Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. A contemporary lamination, an elegy for the authenticity of experience, and for re-claiming one's own life. Which, after all, is the same as love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE features a giant Gulliver, dancing cows, ferocious boundaries, counterfactual history, and shocking deaths. The protagonist, the poet Byron - his delusion (not always charming but somehow courageously engaging) - drives him to seek out a frighteningly desperate truth to the raw reality of his life. A life where love and loss predominate the landscape.
About the authors
Don Druick is a distinguished playwright, translator, a baroque flutist, and an avid bread baker. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Don Druick's plays and translations have been produced on stage, radio and television in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the USA. He has received twelve Canada Council grants in Theatre, Creative Writing, Performance Art; as well as grants from the Ministère des Affairs Culturale de Quèbec, the Japan-Canada Fund, the Laidlaw Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council. Having lived in Vancouver and Montreal, Don Druick currently lives with artist Jane Buyers in Elmira Ontario, a small village 125 km west of Toronto. Don Druick's previous works include the award-winning plays Where is Kabuki?, Through the Eyes, Lie Doggo, and the hit CBC radio series Recipe for Murder. He is presently working on a novel entitled The Name We Didn't Know.
Brian Quirt is a dramaturg, director and playwright. He is Artistic Director of Nightswimming, a Toronto dramaturgical company that has commissioned 30 works of dance and drama, and Director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Lab. With more than 25 years experience as a dramaturg, Brian has worked with many of Canada’s leading playwrights. As a director, his credits include premieres of these Nightswimming commissions: Anita Majumdar’s Fish Eyes Trilogy (2014/15 national tour) and Same Same But Different (Theatre Passe Muraille/Alberta Theatre Projects), Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box (2012-2014 national tour), Anosh Irani’s Bombay Black (Cahoots Theatre and tour), Judith Thompson’s Such Creatures (Theatre Passe Muraille), Andy Massingham’s Rough House (national tour) and Richard Sanger’s Whispering Pines (GCTC). He has created seven of his own plays, most recently Why We Are Here! (with Martin Julien). His plays include the 2009 Summerworks hit Lake Nora Arms (adapted from Michael Redhill’s book with Jane Miller), Blue Note (with Martin Julien; Harbourfront Centre), The Death of General Wolfe (Theatre Passe Muraille), and adaptations of Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (Tarragon Theatre), and the Iranian play Aurash (with Soheil Parsa; Modern Times Theatre in Toronto, Iran, Columbia, Cuba and Bosnia). He has been Interim Artistic Director of the Great Canadian Theatre Company, Company Dramaturg at Factory Theatre, Dramaturg at the Theatre Centre and Dramaturgical Associate at the Canadian Stage Company. He is a Board member and past-President of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, a two-time recipient of LMDA’s Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy, and has been nominated for three Dora Awards, two for Direction and one for his adaptation of the Aurash.