Public Lies and Other Plays
by Robert Fothergill
Detaining Mr. Trotsky
Winner of the Chalmers New
Play Award in 1988. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, returning to
Petrograd from New York in April 1917, is arrested by British authorities
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and sent to an internment camp at Amherst.
His turbulent presence threatens the authority of the commandant and
creates a crisis of loyalty for the young lieutenant who falls under
his spell.
“Detaining Mr. Trotsky,
Toronto Free Theatre’s first offering of the new season, is that rare
and precious commodity, a play of ideas.”
—Robert Crew,
Toronto Star
“…a well-crafted and exciting
play, one of the best the Free has come up with in a number of years.”
—Ray Conlogue,
The Globe and Mail
“…a gripping story of political
intrigue, bigotry, class elitism and personal conflict.”
—Rod Currie,
The Canadian Press
Public Lies
Nominated for both a Chalmers
Award and a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 1994. Who controls the way we
see the world? John Grierson, first Commissioner of the National Film
Board of Canada, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s “propaganda
maestro” in the early 1940s, declared that “public lies must not
be told” – but they sometimes were. Back in Canada in the fall of
1970, an elderly Grierson is confronted with unfinished business, both
personal and political, by two of his wartime assistants, and is re-engaged
in issues of media manipulation by the unfolding October Crisis.
“Public Lies is not
only thought-provoking and rivetingly contemporary, but often witty
and insightful as well.”
—John Colbourn,
Toronto Sun
“Fothergill may have opened
a new field for Canadian drama. If Grierson can be made the subject
of a good play, what can’t be done with our cultural history?”
—Robert Fulford,
The Globe and Mail
Borderline
Winner of the Herman Voaden
New Canadian Play Award in 1999. In April 1994, nearly a million Rwandan
Tutsis are massacred by the majority Hutu. In July, when the Tutsi-led
Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) gains control of the capital, Kigali, thousands
of Hutu are prompted to flee across the border to UN refugee camps.
In Borderline, a Canadian aid worker encounters her former student
and lover who, as a prominent Hutu, is now in
danger of Tutsi reprisal.
The Dershowitz Protocol
Winner of the Ottawa Little
Theatre New Play Contest in 2005. If the judicially-sanctioned torture
of suspected terrorists might actually forestall a repeat of 9/11, why
not use it? In its starkest form, this is the question posed in his
book, Why Terrorism Works, by Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz.
The Dershowitz Protocol dramatizes the first actual use of “rigorous
interrogation” of a ticking-bomb terror-suspect by court-appointed
US officials, under newly established Department of Justice rules.
“Powerful and disturbing.”
—NOW Magazine
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