Staged Reading Series (2024/2025)
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About The Readings
Staged Reading Series
Purchase our staged reading series and enjoy four wonderful readings.
The Leisure Society: Francois Archambault
Translated by Bobby Theodore
October 2024
Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western economic growth: make more, earn more, have more.
Bringing a child into this frightening world fuelled by instant gratification; wanting to have some time and space for themselves so they can continue to grow and develop; or dedicating time to deepen the bonds between their friends; all seem like colossal tasks. Even worse, they seem like acts of resistance—one could even say betrayal—against a system that requires everyone to be active, productive and consuming.
But in this dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy echoing The Wastemakers of the 1950s, is it too late for such unthinkable acts of defiance?
Unity (1918): Kevin Kerr
November 2024
In the fall of 1918, a world ravaged by four years of war was suddenly hit by a mysterious and deadly plague—the “Spanish Flu.” The illness struck not only the young and the elderly, but also people in the prime of their lives, advancing rapidly toward mortality in its victims. This phenomenon in effect brought the terror, the panic, the horror and the sense of helplessness of the Great War home with the returning soldiers—more people died of this epidemic than had been killed in battle throughout the armed conflict.
As fear of the dreaded flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. The town is quarantined in an attempt to keep the illness out. Trains are forbidden to stop, no one can enter, and the borders are sealed. Mail from overseas, feared to be carrying the deadly virus, is gathered and then burned. But when the disease descends upon the town despite their precautions, the citizens begin to turn on each other as they attempt to find a scapegoat for the crisis.
Very little has been written about this worldwide calamity which, more than the war itself, destroyed forever the genteel and naive presumptions of European colonial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kevin Kerr offers audiences not only an epic chronicle of this forgotten chapter of Canadian history, but a chilling preview of the beginnings of our own new century.
The play is a Gothic romance, filled with dark comedy and the desperate embrace of life at the edge of death.
Outside Mullingar: John Patrick Shanley
February 2025
Outside Mullingar is about the romance of Anthony and Rosemary, neighbors in rural Ireland, who are nearing their middle years. It is by turns poetic, uplifting, dark and funny as hell. Anthony is an introverted farmer and Rosemary is the woman who vows to have him at all costs. When Anthony’s father threatens to disinherit his son, Rosemary steps into the middle of a land feud and family eccentricities beyond what one might imagine. On the brink of romantic catastrophe, this one-of-a-kind Irish
Marion Bridge: Daniel MacIvor
May 2025
Three women in their thirties come “home” to Cape Breton to be with their dying mother. Each in her own way tries to deal with the painful loneliness of their lives – each is trying to reconcile what they habve become with what they thought they wanted out of life and with what they thought their parents wanted for them. Nothing, of course, has turned out exactly the way anyone imagined it would.
WHEN YOU BUY THE SERIES PLEASE EMAIL janet@peninsulaproductions.org to choose your dates. Thurs/Friday at 7:00 or Sat/Sun at 2:00
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