Bone Cage
by Catherine Banks
Bone Cage is a poetic
and darkly humorous portrayal of life in rural Nova Scotia, where stripping
the environment means stripping your soul. Jamie is twenty-two years
old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting
for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction
he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those
he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear
of leaving the place where he has some status. Bone Cage examines
how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of
the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of
their shift.
Bone Cage is about the
difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams
are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about
different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib
cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.
"Wildly ambitious, urgently
contemporary, and savagely frank, it dares to examine a rural Nova Scotia
way of life with all its warts and joy. 'courageous, poetic, powerful'
Banks provides enough late adolescent and early adult joy to remind
us all that these are tough, real characters who take their enjoyment
when they can get it."
-Infomonkey.net
"Bone Cage is a bold
and satisfying new play about a young man trapped in a soul-killing
industry in rural Nova Scotia. This drama is like a David Adams Richards
novel in its bleak, unflinching look at rural life'. Where Adams Richards
is grimly poetic' Banks goes for a black humour and a touch of the
surreal."
-The Chronicle Herald
Read what Sunil Kuruvilla has to say about Bone Cage at Suite 101.
Winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama
“With her expert command of dramatic metaphor, Catherine Banks shows us the life-blood of rural Canada flowing through the conflicted, bone-caged human heart. What is the cost to the human spirit, she asks, when good people are forced by circumstance to kill the thing they love—in this case, the Canadian wilderness? The playwright finds that which is most noble in unexpected places, the heroic in what appears to be the simplest of lives.” —Governor General’s Literary Awards Jury Citation
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