About the Play:

Winner of the 1990 Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama

Bordertown Café is full-length dramatic comedy by Kelly Rebar. Jimmy's dad, a good old boy from the USA, creates comic chaos when he tries to lure his son from his Canadian mother to the "land of plenty." Torn between adolescence and adulthood, between his father and his mother, between Canada and the US, Jimmy struggles to reconcile his personal and national identity in a spirited comedy that is full of family dynamics in three generations.

Bordertown Café revolves around a young man named Jimmy and a small café in rural Alberta close to the US Border operated by his grandparents and his single mother. In his final year of high school, the 17-year-old is faced with an important life decision: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south to the land of opportunity. Jimmy's dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offers Jimmy the prosperity of his new American home, a large modern house fully equipped with everything, including a capable new wife. In contrast, Jimmy's mom, Marlene, is a failed wife and a weak, tentative mother. The home she has made for herself and her son "on the Canadian side of nowhere" is provisional and shabby: half finished, ill equipped, badly decorated. Will Jimmy embrace the myth of the hero or build a different identity? Jimmy's conflict is writ large as the play dramatizes Canada's struggle to negotiate a unique identity in the shadow of its brash, superpower neighbour. Although global realities have shifted in the decades since the play's inception, its themes of personal and cultural identity endure.

Bordertown Café was commissioned by Blyth Festival and premiered there in 1987 becoming one of the most popular plays in its history. It has been widely produced in theatres across Canada, including Theatre New Brunswick, Montréal's Centaur Theatre, London's Grand Theatre, Winnipeg's Prairie Theatre Exchange, Regina's Globe Theatre, Theatre Calgary, and Vancouver Arts Club Theatre. Its popularity endures and this Canadian classic continues to be well received by audiences, especially outside big city Canada.

Cast: 2 women, 2 men

What people say:

"An iconic piece of Prairie Canadiana." — Winnipeg Free Press

"Family relationships simmer in humorous cross-border comedy." — Ottawa Citizen

"A humorous, human, touching and recognizable look at one family's search for individual identity." — Hamilton Spectator

"Kelly Rebar's Bordertown Cafe, a classic of Canadian homegrown theatre ... is just as relevant today as it was when it premiered in 1987 ... The characters are well defined and we come to care deeply for them as they try valiantly to muddle their way through life – just as we do." — Waterloo Region Record

About the Playwright:

Kelly Rebar is a Canadian playwright and screenwriter. Born in Lethbridge Alberta, she grew up in Calgary, and graduated from York University in Film Studies. She is best known for the play and film Bordertown Café, a coming-of-age story about a teen who must decide whether to follow his dad to a new life in the United States or stay with his mom at the family's roadside cafe, perched on the Alberta-Montana border. She has also written for television and film and has several screenwriting and story editing credits to her name.