About the Play:

Corker is a play by Wendy Lill, which uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state.

Opening with the extended family's awkward attendance at "Serena", aging flower child of the sixties' funeral, the symbolic conflicts build quickly.

Serena's sister "Merit", the hard driving, social program budget slashing female political aparatchik and her husband "Leonard", a lion of free enterprise, are hell bent on dismantling their government's social services by replacing them with a privatized human warehousing system whose track record to date has been the streamlining of the American prison system.

But there's a problem: Serena's developmentally challenged friend "Corker," the family's faded and failed country gentleman brother "Galahad'" and their octogenarian mother "Florence," all become victims of Merit and Leonard's "success."

It is Wendy Lill's great skill as a playwright that actually makes this symbolism work by unraveling it into a devastating conclusion that is seen in two completely different ways by the characters and the audience.

While everyone in Corker is celebrating their "one big happy family" reunion, (brought about by Merit and Leonard having seen the "error of their ways"), the audience, having realized the characters are all about to lose their comfortable designer house and are headed for the unheated trailer park, watches in horror as the social worker brings in huge green garbage bags of junk.

Corker is not what it seems at all. This play is not agit-prop. This is killer theatre.

Cast: 2 women, 4 men.

About the Playwright:

Wendy Lill was born in Vancouver, and was raised and educated on the West Coast. She worked in various parts of Canada, finally settling in Nova Scotia. Her experiences in journalism and broadcasting influenced and encouraged her to "fictionalize real incidents and events," resulting in a career as an award winning playwright. She has been described as a writer of "contemporary social issues with a clear-cut women's perspective." Her interest in events that shaped Canadian history and Canadian cultural identity has influenced and informed her work. As well as stage plays, she has written screen-plays and award winning radio documentaries and dramas.

In 1979, while with CBC Radio in Winnipeg, Wendy Lill wrote her first play, On the Line, to dramatize the plight of striking Winnipeg garment industry workers. Since then, her plays have gone on to examine the Canadian women's suffrage movement (The Fighting Days); aboriginal-white relations (The Occupation of Heather Rose, ); pedophilia and mass hysteria (All Fall Down); the slashing of social programs (Corker); and the dangerous lives of coal miners in her adopted province of Nova Scotia (The Glace Bay Miners' Museum). Her skill at turning the potentially deadly "issue play" into compelling, emotionally charged theatre has resulted in four nominations for the Governor General's Drama Award.