For their 44th theatrical season, the Borelians CommunityTheatre will proudly present the award-winning and critically acclaimed Canadian
drama, The Drawer Boy.
An international success, this play, by Canadian playwright, Michael
Healey, received instant praise and multiple awards since its first Toronto
production in 1999. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for English Language
Drama, the Dora Mavor Moore Award
for Outstanding New Play, and a Chalmers
Award, The Drawer Boy has been
heralded as a Canadian classic, not to be missed by anyone.
The Story
Set in the summer of 1972, the play tells the story of two bachelor
farmers who lead a quiet existence working together on a small farm in Clinton,
Ontario, until the arrival of a young actor from Toronto who is researching farm-life. The farmers’ story spans a World War and is
fogged with memories of pain and injury, love and loss, secrets and lies. But, as the young man pieces their precarious
history together, he realizes that the truth behind the farmers’ past is far
more heartbreaking than he could have ever possibly imagined.
The Playwright
Michael Healey is a Canadian playwright and actor born in Brockville,
Ontario, 1963. He graduated from the acting programme at Toronto's Ryerson
Theatre School in 1985.
His plays include The Drawer Boy,
Plan B and Rune Arlidge.
The Drawer Boy has received international acclaim and productions
all over the world, most notably by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and earned Healey the 1999 Governor
General's Award for Drama. According to the Wall
Street Journal, it was the fourth most-produced play in the United States
during the first decade of the 21st century. Healey is a former writer-in-residence
at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.
For more information about Michael Healey: CLICK HERE
Themes and Ideas
The Drawer Boy is an emotional and thoughtful drama that explores,
amongst its many themes, the search for and expression of truth. The play looks at the long-term and lasting
effects of war through Morgan and Angus, two veterans of World War II, who have
forged a friendship through shared hardships and precarious memories of the war,
the truth of which seems best forgotten in the past. Miles, in contrast, is searching
for truth through his creative process as an artist, hoping to awaken the
social consciousness of his audience through theatre. Through Miles, the play questions the responsibility
that art has in revealing uncomfortable truths to society.
The play also brings to light issues that farmers continue to face since
the 1970’s, such as the disappearance of small, family-operated farms in rural
Canadian towns, and how technology has modified farming techniques in order to
increase yield to meet market demand. The Drawer Boy, through elegant dialogue
and delicate conflict, provides a snapshot of Canada in the early 1970’s. Political
climate, social upheaval, global unrest, urbanization are all thematically
represented in The Drawer Boy.
Fragments of Canadian
History
Parts of The Drawer Boy make
reference to actual events in Canadian history. Aside from the two farmers’
(Morgan and Angus) emotional remembrances of being enlisted with the Princess Patricia's in World War II,
the play also provides insight into the early years of one of Canada’s oldest,
English-Speaking, alternative theatres, Theatre
Passe Murraille.
In The Drawer Boy, Miles, a
young actor working for Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, visits Morgan and
Angus’s farm to research rural farm-life for a collective creation, later to be
known as, The Farm Show. In actual fact, The Farm Show was a work of documentary theatre that was created
when several young actors from Theatre Passe Murraille chose to live for a
summer with farming families in Clinton, Ontario, in order to record the social
conditions and problems faced by rural Canadians. The dialogue that was
performed in The Farm Show came
directly from the farmers and the families that were interviewed by the actors.
The Farm Show received its first presentation
in Ray Bird’s barn in Clinton, Ontario, before it toured to rural markets,
community centres, and other cattle barns across Ontario. Eventually it moved on to much success in Toronto and across
Canada, eventually becoming a landmark in Canadian theatre history,
exemplifying the philosophy of the Ethnographic Theatre movement and producing
critical awareness of the issues faced by Canadian farmers, even to this day.