About the Play:

Winner of the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Bone Cage is a full-length drama by Catherine Banks. Set against a backdrop of the forestry industry, Bone Cage takes a hard look at the lives of young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment – how they treat the people they love at the end of their shift as they struggle on, driven by the hope of one day finding love and escape.

Bone Cage is a poetic and darkly humorous portrayal of life in rural Nova Scotia, where stripping the environment means stripping your soul. Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts in forestry with Kevin, clear-cutting ever-dwindling tracts of forest for pulp, while Jamie's half-sister Chicky mows sod, stripping the topsoil. Employed in industries that devastate the environment, their emotional lives and connections with others are equally stunted. At the end of each shift, Jamie walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status. Bone Cage is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.

Bone Cage premiered in 2007 at Neptune Theatre in Halifax. Since winning a Governor General's Literary Award for English drama in 2008, the play has enjoyed productions across Canada and has been performed in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"With her expert command of dramatic metaphor, Catherine Banks shows us the life-blood of rural Canada flowing through the conflicted, con-caged human heart. The playwright finds that which is most noble in unexpected places, the heroic in what appears to be the simplest of lives." — Governor General's Literary Award Jury Citation

"Bone Cage is a bold and satisfying new play about a young man trapped in a soul-killing industry in rural Nova Scotia. This drama is like a David Adams Richards novel in its bleak, unflinching look at rural life'. Where Adams Richards is grimly poetic' Banks goes for a black humour and a touch of the surreal." — The Chronicle Herald

About the Playwright:

Catherine Banks is a Canadian playwright whose work has been described as poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical; her characters as Atlantic Gothic. She began her career as a special education teacher, and published her first play in 1991. Catherine Banks says she learned the power of drama from listening to real-life stories in her grandmother's kitchen. She lives in Sambro, Nova Scotia, a rural fishing village in the greater Halifax area.