About the Play:

Colours in the Dark is a full-length drama by James Reaney. The play takes place in the mind of a boy who is confined to bed and darkness because of measles. He presses his hands to his eyes in the dark and sees on the inner-screen of his eyelids the colours and the terrors and delights of childhood that shape and will shape his life.

Colours in the Dark is a touching look at growing up in Canada that might best be called a play box of colours and fantasies. Why? Its child-like exuberance is reminiscent of when you empty your treasured toy box one afternoon and play out every story you know, mashed up with bits of memories and emotions you had nearly forgotten. Here is part of what the playwright said about it in the program for the Stratford premiere production:

I happen to have a play box and it's filled with not only toys and school relics, but also deedboxes, ancestral coffin plates – in short, a whole life. When you sort through the play box you eventually see your whole life – as well as all of life – things like Sunday School albums which show Elijah being fed by ravens, St. Stephen being stoned. The theatrical experience in front of you now is designed to give you that mosaic – that all-things-happening at-the-same-time galaxy-higgledy-piggledy feeling that rummaging through a play box can give you. But underneath the juxtaposition of coffin plate with baby rattle with Royal Family Scrapbook with Big Little Book with pictures of King Billy and Hitler, there is the backbone of a person growing up, leaving home, going to big cities, getting rather mixed up and then not coming home again, but making home and identity come to him wherever he is. The kids at the very end of the play manage to get their lightning rod up and attract the thunder that alone can wake the dead. Or, on the other six hands, as Buddha says, there are any number of other interpretations that fit the mosaic we're (director, writer, actors, kids, designers, composer) giving you.

Colours in the Dark premiered sensationally in 1967 at the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. The second Canadian play ever produced during Canada's prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival, it won favourable reviews and enjoyed a standing ovation on its opening night. Since then the play has been successfully staged at professional theatres in Canada, including the Vancouver Playhouse in 1969, and has been performed in high school and college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male, 1 girl and 1 boy

What people say:

"In his beautiful play Colours in the Dark, James Reaney reminds us that we have wonder in all of us too, that the world of childhood – sometimes bright, sometimes terrifying – exists in all of us, has helped to make us who we are." — Vancouver Sun

"Both funny and touching… intriguingly original in its conception." — Quill & Quire

About the Playwright:

James Reaney (1926-2008) was one of Canada's finest poets and dramatists. The three time winner of the Governor General's Award, he was the author of numerous plays and poetry collections and taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario for a total of forty years. He received his doctorate with Northrop Frye.