Henry Czerny and Brent Carver in Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989)

Kristen Thomson

Someone Else

“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life… with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve as before.” –Roland Barthes

Following the success of I, Claudia and The Patient Hour, playwright Kristen Thomson is currently part of our works in development with her latest play, Someone Else.

Cathy (Kristen Thomson) is a stand up comedian in a creative slump and Peter (Tom Rooney) is a doctor at a community clinic. They’ve been married for eighteen years but it feels like five hundred and couples therapy isn’t helping. Confronting an uncertain future and an unexcavated past, they seem bound for heartache when an intimate and sobering encounter with someone else forces them to recognize the fragile foundations that their life is built on. Careening between hilarity and disaster, this play is a naked examination of marriage, middle age, and the delicate nature of change.

Someone Else will get its world premiere at the Berkeley Street Theatre in January 2013 produced by Crow’s Theatre in association Canadian Stage as a part of the Berkeley Street Project Initiative.

James Long (Top) and Marcus Youssef (Bottom)

Winners and Losers

Is being a winner only dependent on the person beside you being a little bit more of a loser?

This past November AD Chris Abraham travelled to Vancouver to spend a few days with Marcus Youssef and James Long regarding their new project Winners and Losers.

Based on the current proposition that competition is inevitable and if pushed to its logical end results in genocide (Neanderthal vs. Cro magnon, Cain vs. Abel, Europeans vs. First Nations), the two men share a small space within a film-editing suite. As they sort through, watch and re-edit a collection of found 16mm Russian films, they play a game of naming people, places or things — Ronald Reagan, North Korea, Pamela Anderson, the CBC, First Nations, Stephen Hawking, Capitalism etc — and then debate whether these subjects are winners or losers. The material draws closer as the debate moves into discussions of themselves, their families and their individual upbringings – one man being a product of privilege and the other not. A winner will emerge.

Or that is what exists after four weeks of development. In its final form Winners and Losers will include bits of the above and everything else from pushing matches to aggressive passive aggression. Creation with Neworld Theatre and Theatre Replacement under the direction of Chris Abraham will continue to evolve through 2012, and enter the public ring sometime in 2013.