About the Play:

Cold Comfort has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes and Three-Person Scenes.

Cold Comfort is a full-length drama by Jim Garrard. A dark and twisted play set in a dilapidated, makeshift home on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway in rural Saskatchewan. A travelling salesman crashes in a storm and is "rescued" by an older man who brings him back to his house as a "gift" for his teenage Daughter.

Cold Comfort is about a crazed farmer who holds a passing city slicker hostage. The play could take place anywhere along the Trans-Canada Highway, but it happens to be set in Saskatchewan, the geographic centre of Canada. There are three characters in Cold Comfort: Dolores, a fifteen-year-old girl who wants to know more about the world than what the window and the household TV can tell her; Floyd, her father, with whom she lives in an abandoned service station, whose paternal misdeeds form the sinister backdrop for the play's action; and Stephen, the proverbial travelling salesman, who unwittingly stumbles into this complex relationship and finally becomes victim to it.

Cold Comfort premiered in 1981 at 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon. It was a surprise hit at the Salon Theatre during the huge Toronto Theatre Festival in 1981 and had regional premieres at professional theatres across Canada. The British premiere was in 1995 at New Vic Studio in Bristol and the production then played London's Wimbledon Theatre and Brighton's Komedia Theatre. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and was revived in Toronto by Theatre Passe Muraille; and has been produced in Vancouver at the Station Street Arts Centre, at Vancouver East Cultural Centre (affectionately known as "The Cultch"), and the Havana Theatre.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"A remarkable achievement… A solid and memorable show." — Toronto Star

"Sheer genius!" — CBC Radio

"Jim Garrard's Cold Comfort [is] a hilarious and chilling piece that can only be described as 'Prairie Gothic' ... an entertaining and rewarding show." — The Whig-Standard (Kingston, Ontario)

"Jim Garrard's Cold Comfort is one of the blackest possible comedies on the myth of Prairie hospitality and a gruesome twist on the travelling salesman joke. More than the psycho-thriller it might at first seem to be, this piece of Canadian Gothic draws on a lot of things, xenophobia and the hostility within class difference among them." — The Vancouver Sun

About the Playwright:

Jim Garrard is a Canadian playwright and former artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille and Salon Theatre Productions. He literally changed the face of Canadian theatre in 1968 when he founded Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Since those early years of groundbreaking work, his plays have been professionally produced across the country and the United Kingdom. He has taught theatre at Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto and has written extensively for film and television.