| IN THIS
ISSUE: | |
- Product Spotlight: The Works of Lucia Frangione
- The Biz Interview: Robert Salvador of Espresso - Final Week at Pacific Theatre
| | PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT: | | The Works of Lucia Frangione 
Lucia Frangione is an internationally produced award winning Canadian playwright and actor, best known for performing in her own works. The author of over twenty-five plays, she received training through Studio 58 and Rosebud School of the Arts. Espresso by Lucia Frangione  Espresso is full-length drama by Lucia Frangione. Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. Espresso is a shot of caffeine, Italian family, death and Catholic erotic mysticism. One of Lucia Frangione's blasphemy plays, it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast as either fathers to be looked up to or sons to be looked after, where, for women, is the possibility of a flesh-and-blood lover, challenging her to open her heart without trespassing her will — a lover as he appears in the Song of Solomon: passionate, earthy, creative, vulnerable and beautiful — the avatar of the holy spirit? There has been a horrible car crash, and Vito, the patriarch of an immigrant family, has had his body smashed and his heart lacerated, his life hanging by threads of tubes and wires in an intensive care ward. His family has rushed in from all over the country for an anxious vigil of hope, prayer and memory by his bedside. In this crucible of anxiety, a single actress alternately narrates and enacts her own and her family's history along with an uninvited narrator/actor, Amante ("lover" in Italian). As Amante engages all the women of the clan Rosa plays in a swirl of sharply portrayed characters — Vito's mother, Nonna, forced into marriage at thirteen but only now, at sixty-seven, experiencing the first intimations of her body's desire; the pit-bull martyrdom of Vito's second wife, Vincenza; and Rosa herself in her own thin, urbane skin stretched tight to hold in the red, passionate blood that boils just below the surface — we are never sure whether Rosa has created Amante or he has created her. Our Price: $15.95 Paradise Garden by Lucia Frangione  Paradise Garden is a full-length drama by Lucia Frangione. A modern romance against all odds. In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this "wilderness" into an English country garden complete with vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and an elegant gazebo. After six generations, times and circumstances have changed, the family estate has been subdivided, the flowers have gone wild, the pear-tree has rotted and the heritage house has been carved up into a duplex, the property now divided in two by an ugly hedge. The McKinnons now live in one side of the property, while the other has been sold to an immigrant family recently arrived from Turkey. The heirs apparent to both families, Day McKinnon and Leyla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, tolerating with thinly disguised amusement their ancestors' "outdated" formalities and rituals. So alienated are they that they spend much of their time only half-jokingly speaking of themselves in the third person. Yet Leyla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old garden: its tumbled and overgrown ruins remind her of the Paradise Garden of Judeo-Christian/Islamic tradition — its layout in the four cardinal directions, its allusions to the seasons and the elements, and its walls that surround a place of secret love. For Day, however, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he has discovered a long-buried family secret, "The problem with being born into paradise is: eventually you inherit it. There's something to be said for the bedlam of hell. Heaven is a lot of upkeep." Abandoning their families for their careers, they are reunited years later having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but something that we must build by hand in the wilderness of our lives. Our Price: $17.95 Click here to order your copy of this great product! Caribou Magi by Lucia Frangione  Winner of the 2002 Jessies, Sydney Risk Award for outstanding new play by an emerging playwright. Cariboo Magi is full-length drama by Lucia Frangione. An unabashed celebration of the power of theatre to renew our lives and banish our cares. A drunken Anglican minister who has failed to convert anyone in ten years, an avaricious saloon keeper with a murder in her past, a pregnant child star who has become too old for her roles and a man who claims to be the last of the Mohicans all need a new lease on life. They intercept a contract meant for a San Diego theatre company, form a bedraggled troupe of players and head north, through the wilds of the Cariboo gold rush to perform a Christmas Pageant for the Theatre Royal in Barkerville, BC. On their way, they rehearse a hilarious pastiche of Hamlet, The Last of the Mohicans, A Christmas Carol and The Gospel of Luke, gradually finding a way to legitimize their only true talents as "professional liars." Our Price: $15.95 Click here to order your copy of this great product! Leave of Absence by Lucia Frangione  Winner of the ACTivist Theatre Amnesty International Playwright Contest, 2011. Leave of Absence is a full-length drama by Lucia Frangione. An entire community is blown apart when a teenaged girl suspected of being gay is brutalized by her classmates. The booming bedroom community outside a large Canadian city is torn apart when fifteen-year-old Blake challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. A student at the local Catholic high school, Blake confides in her best friend, Tracy, that she feels sexually attracted to her. At first encouraged and then rebuffed, Blake is eventually betrayed. Then, increasingly at risk among her peers, Blake finds the watchful and strict eyes of her Catholic school are no protection. Vulnerable to collectivized hatred, she remains unprotected by the adults who guard her freedom – her mother, the school principal, the local priest – all respond in different ways, some liberally supporting her emerging sexuality; others quite conservatively vilifying her as a deviant, outside the church and outside the community. Ultimately, they do not act to protect her, and in their inaction, they are absent, truly unable to help. The audience is left with the question: Like these characters, what have we left undone? What ethics surround the absence of acting in response to another's need? At the centre of this searing drama of bigotry and transcendence is the brutal dehumanization of the other – of both the bully and the victim. Full of humour, compassion and mysticism, the outcome challenges the fall out of the Catholic church response to the same-sex marriage rulings in Canada and how it affects youth. It also asks the greater community about the ethics of being absent. Our Price: $17.95 Click here to order your copy of this great product! | | THE BIZ INTERVIEW: | | Robert Salvador of Espresso - Final Week at Pacific Theatre  Vancouver's Robert Salvador is currently featured in Pacific Theatre's production of Espresso by Lucia Frangione. As he starts the final week of the show's run, Robert spoke to us about his experience with the production and his creative process. Read the interview here! |
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