Magpie, Having, Hunger Striking

In Magpie, winner of the Grain Drama Award, we meet Bernice, large, middle-aged, and prone to fantasies. Her small-town life is disrupted by the arrival of a gifted dance instructor. He is everything she aspires to be and that her background rejects as frivolous. The men in her life, husband, doctor and evangelist preacher, cannot keep her in the confines of her reality, and her fantasy world escalates into a place that is much larger and more exciting than life.

Having dramatizes our progressive society and its materialistically driven values and cyber-navigated spaces within a romantic arch of 18th-century poetry and the motif of the "highwayman." Contemporary lives raging with ambition, self-destructive tendencies and the fight for freedom and control are played out in a high-tech world set in the mystical ambience conjured by the "moors."

In Hunger Striking Sarah's student Katie has just died of anorexia. Her death propels Sarah into her own memories, taking her from her present-day reality as a high school English teacher into multiple pasts: her own past as an anorexic girl twenty years earlier, her Celtic heritage with its vivid creatures and mythology passed on to her by her father, and the world of the hunger-striking suffragettes at the beginning of the last century.

In addition to editing numerous drama anthologies for Signature Editions, Kit Brennan is an award-winning playwright whose work has been seen across the country. She is a faculty member at Concordia University's Theatre Department in Montreal, where she coordinates the undergraduate playwriting specialization.