Fw: plays

[dkeith]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julie Salverson" <jsalverson at oise.utoronto.ca>
To: <dkeith at silk.net>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 7:27 PM
Subject: plays


> Dear Don,
>
> I read your note with a lot of, well, connection. I was in the middle of a
> production during the teacher's strike in Ontario a few years ago, and it
> was a play about land mines for the international conference to ratify the
> demining agreement...the students were totally committed to it...we
> suspended rehearsals in the school but they wanted to carry on so we
> worked in one of the student's basements...anyway, I appreciate your
> dilemma, and your choice.
>
> Probably this play isn't right, but just in case...I just did a show in
> the fall that I wrote, called "The Haunting of Sophie Scholl".  It is
> about a contemporary university student trying to understand what allowed
> Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, and a few others, circulate a leaflet
> against National Socialism in Munich in 1942-43. They were caught within a
> few months and executed.  Our students at the drama department at Queen's,
> in Kingston, Ont., found themselves rehearsing this play just after
> September 11, and rather huge things happened amongst the company, and
> then later the audience, because the play is about how to speak in an
> atmosphere of censoreship...what kinds of ways are there to speak?  What
> is it when you can't know your own history (the main character has a
> grandfather he lives with who is German who would never talk to him about
> the war..)...it is set in both contemporary times, a school today, and in
> Germany.  About a kind of backwards haunting, the past and the future
> questioning each other.   Also about heroes, and what it means to
> remember, and who has a right to be a hero, and what does it mean to be an
> ordinary person caught in something, or trying to resist something, in
> simple non-heroic terms.
>
> Right now the play has only eleven characters, although there was some
> doubling so it could I think have about 18.
>
> If you are at all interested I'd be glad to send you the script.
> Otherwise i will keep thinking about your question, and forward your
> message.
>
> all the best to you...B.C. certainly is going to be a challenge to the
> rest of us for a time. I was involved in the teachers strike here also, so
> send all the support possible from a stranger.
>
> Julie Salverson