In Development
Created by Christian Barry and Hawksley Workman
The God that Comes is a new collaboration between 2b theatre company and Juno-winning rocker Hawksley Workman. This one-man live performance fuses the chaotic revelry of a rock concert with the captivating intimacy of theatrical storytelling. The God that Comes tells the story of Greco- Roman god of wine Bacchus (or Dionysus) and uses Euripides’ classic The Bacchae as a primary source. In a world ruled by greed and an oppressive king obsessed with rules and order, the lesser classes have taken to the countryside in a hedonistic spiritual revolution fueled by wine, ritual madness, and ecstasy. Women, slaves, outlaws, and foreigners have all gone to the mountain to worship the god of wine, and to commune with their animal needs to dance, to lose control, to get drunk, and have sex. The king rails against the protesters, leading to a bloody conclusion.
The God that Comes is a tonic for a society that has lost its sense of balance, and for a people that have lost touch with their animal instincts. It is an invitation to raise a glass together, hear a story, and get lost in the music for a few hours.
The Freud Project
by Michael MacKenzie; direction & dramaturgy by Anthony Black
2b begins its first collaboration with playwright Michael MacKenzie (The Baroness and The Pig, Geometry in Venice), on a new script, provisionally titled The Freud Project. The play examines the renowned psychiatrist’s relationship with his daughter, Anna, and his sister-in-law, Minna.
The Freud Project turns the lens of psychoanalysis back on Freud himself, suggesting among other things, that the development of his new science was perhaps a projection of his own anxieties, neuroses, and repressions. The Freud Project exists as a working draft. The basis of our work, as MacKenzie has proposed it, will be to find a new structural idea, linked to Freud’s theories of unconscious association, to crack open the material.
The Birth Control Project
by Hannah Moscovitch; direction and dramaturgy by Christian Barry
The Birth Control Project is a new collaboration with Hannah Moscovitch that investigates important themes of gender, language, and class, and explores the murky roots of the Canadian birth control movement as mingled with the eugenics movement. The project is comprised of two new plays: What a Young Wife Ought to Know tells the story of teenaged sisters who are forced to make horrifically chilling choices when they both become attracted to the same stable-boy; Kaufman tells the true story of 1930’s Canadian birth-controller and eugenicist A.R. Kaufman, and his famous court victory that led to the legalization of birth control in Canada. The two plays will eventually be produced as a double-bill.
The Birth Control Project is inspired by primary sources from the 1920s and 30s: the letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, advertisements, and trial transcripts of the day. In particular, Hannah has been using as her main source a series of letters from lower-class women to Dr. Marie Stopes, begging for help with birth control. These are some desperate times for women who have little to no control over their bodies, or their life choices.
Created by Christian Barry; inspired by Bartleby the Scrivener, and other works by Herman Melville
“I would prefer not to,” he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.
Bartleby… is new creation project, helmed by director Christian Barry. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is as remarkably timely and enigmatic a meditation on Charity and Depression today as it was when originally published in 1853. Using Bartley as a foundation, a team of creators will develop a new play based on the writings of Herman Melville, exploring themes of charity, trust, confidence, the loss of desire, and the consequences of our actions (or inactions) in the modern Capitalist economic reality.
