About the Play:

2000 is a full-length comedic drama by Joan MacLeod. As contemporary Vancouver encroaches on the earth that bears it, a hermit-like Mountain Man wanders into the lives of a troubled city-living family, changing everything. 2000 is a lighthearted drama that challenges your audience to confront the shifting boundaries between nature and civilization.

2000, set in the high-tech home of a childless-by-choice, professional couple living in the hinterlands of North Vancouver's Lynn Valley, sees a cougar wandering down into the city and shifting their perspectives of the world. According to Joan MacLeod, the play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver: "I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium." In the play, the cougar appears to embody the precarious and increasingly circumscribed state of nature. Living in the home with Sean and Wyn is her 99-year-old grandmother, Nanny, who believes there is a mountain man lurking around the property. Each character relates to nature in a different way, whether it be with distrust, cynicism, awe or longing. The figure of the Mountain Man, a homeless man who has abandoned all of his civilized ways, even speech, to live among the animals of the forest, provides a meeting ground between humanity and nature. Like the cougar, increasingly crowded by a rapidly encroaching civilization, he scavenges what preciously little remains of the beautiful animal in all of us.

2000 premiered in 1996 at Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across Canada, including Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and the Vancouver Playhouse, and has been mounted by community theatres.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…is a remarkable achievement." — Canadian Book Review Annual

"Full of good insights good lines." — University of Toronto Quarterly

About the Playwright:

Joan MacLeod is an internationally celebrated Canadian playwright. She grew up in North Vancouver, lived for eight years in Toronto as playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre, before settling on Bowen Island just outside Vancouver. Since 2004, she has taught at the department of writing at University of Victoria. Her plays have been extensively produced around the world, and she has won multiple theatre awards, including the recipient the Governor General's Award, two Chalmers Canadian Play Awards and the 2011 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, Canada's largest theatre award.