About the Plays:
Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth's best known and most popular plays. The collection contains two full-length plays: Ever Loving (Chalmers and Dora Mavor Moore Award winner) and War Babies (Governor General's Award finalist), and three shorter plays: The Apple in the Eye, Diving and Islands.
Ever Loving follows the lives of three war brides, immigrants after World War II, from 1938 to 1970. Margaret Hollingsworth simultaneously presents these women in Halifax, Hamilton and a farm in Alberta. (Cast: 3 female, 3 male)
War Babies is a play that centers around a play. Written by Esme, pregnant at the age of 42, this inner play explores her relationship with Colin, a war correspondent. Esme creates a fiction; the worst possible outcome of their relationship. (Cast: 3 female, 4 male)
The two shortest, The Apple in the Eye (Cast: 1 female, 2 male) and Diving (Cast: 1 female), again explore the realm of mental withdrawal. The heroines of both plays pull back from the unpleasantness of reality and explore the landscapes within their own minds.
In Islands, Muriel has retreated to a West Coast island to be alone, only to be visited, first by her mother and then by Alli, an ex-lover. Alli herself has retreated into the safety of insanity from which she can freely express everything without inhibition. The combination of the three is explosive. (Cast: 3 female)
Commonwealth Games (formerly Blowing up Toads) is a realistic fast-paced examination of the role of the Commonwealth and the patriarchy at the end of the 20th Century. Three people vie for control over the life of a brilliant 16 year-old girl who is being educated at an Ivy League college in the US. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male)
What people say:
"All of these plays cry out to be acted; each one provides superb roles for performers and striking challenges for directors who are not content to take the easy way out…. While written with stylishness and wit from a woman’s point of view, these plays are not rigidly feminist; although rooted in place, they are not restrictively regional." — Anne Saddlemeyer, from the Introduction
"Playwright Margaret Hollingsworth pulls no punches; she writes about alienation, isolation and the immigrant status of women with passion and clarity. Hollingsworth uses theatre as it should be used, as a revolutionary force, demanding change." — Judith Russell for Whig-Standard
"In Hollingsworth’s plays, internal monologues and external dialogues usually combine to produce complex characters. If they are not our immediate friends, lovers or spouses, they certainly live no further away than down the block." — Jon Kaplan for Now
About the Playwright:
Margaret Hollingsworth was born in Sheffield and grew up in London, England where she wrote plays and worked in theatre while still a teenager. She taught in Italy and Japan, and worked as a journalist, librarian, and actor before emigrating to Fort William, Ontario, where she was chief librarian in 1968. After earning an M.F.A. in theatre, she taught creative writing at the University of Victoria while continuing her writing career. Having also written extensively for television and screen, she has received the Chalmers Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for drama along with three ACTRA awards for radio plays. Her non-dramatic writing includes a collection of short stories, Smiling Under Water.
She has served as playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, Concordia University, and the University of Western Ontario. She currently lives and writes in Toronto.